Midwinter's Digital Advice Solution
As the finance sector embraces the digital age, advances in technology are compelling people to seek new and unique methods of undertaking investment plans and attaining financial advice. The next generation of advice seekers no longer want their first point of contact to be a face to face sales pitch – they want to experience Adviser’s value digitally in a way that is non threatening.
Midwinter has identified the opportunity to expand their current AdviceOS platform, and focus on the needs of the entrepreneurial financial adviser. The Digital Advice Solution software has been created by financial planning experts to deliver a powerful advantage when it comes to ensuring that their clients are engaged within the advice process in a post FoFA world.
Landing page. Solution is using the REST Industry Super branding.
The Challenge
Financial Advisers need a compelling digital platform and strong brand presence in order to obtain members from within the growing untapped market of next generation digitally-savvy advice seekers, as well as potential members who are typically unengaged with the advice and superannuation process.
Midwinter’s in house development team had been developing a prototype for their Digital Advice Solution platform when they contacted 4mation for help with the following:
1) No consistency
The existing user interface lacked consistency in it’s implementation and did not meet best design practices. The impact of this was a user experience which was confusing, inefficient and potentially prone to error. Help was needed to create an exciting and intuitive user interface which could be implemented consistently across the application.
2) Poor user interface
The visual design of the interface lacked polish and refinement. This impacted users perception of the system. The platform also needed to be white labelled to easily adapt an Adviser’s visual brand identity onto the initial calculator through to data capture, dashboard and email communications.
3) Lack of expertise
Midwinter’s internal team lacked the resources and specific expertise to solve their challenges internally. Help was needed to visualise how a digital platform could funnel potential leads into a nurturing campaign which would eventually lead to conversions for the client. This platform would need to establish brand recognition and trust between the Adviser and their potential client.
The Process
The Solution
Below is a mixture of the different UI patterns all rolled into one graphic to demonstrate the template's flexibility in creating custom layouts from the patterns within the library. This particular white labelling of the platform is using Rest Industry Super.
Step wizard
Communicates the length of the survey, as well as acting as a secondary navigation.
Live results
As users interact with the survey, changes to their results are displayed live. This helps communicate the benefits and consequences of each decision towards their long term goal (established on previous steps).
Smart colour pallet
It was important that moving forward, the in-house development team would not need to make any major design decisions. As the product is white labelled, I utilised the inbuilt colour functions within LESS so that a developer could enter a brand's primary hex colour, and the website's colour pallet would be automatically generation.
Simplify the information
To keep users with low financial literacy engaged, any heavy language has been truncated behind friendly hyperlinks, or embedded in tool tips. Clean line info graphics help communicate meaning and work to simplify the interface.
More ways to discover
The calculations rely heavily on a persons Income Goal. This number was previously choosen on a scale of 1 to 4 with the ability to add a custom price range.
We removed the guess work for users who had not considered this previously, by creating a easy quiz that would identify how a user intends to live their retired life and which price bracket that lifestyle would fall into.
The Outcome
The next steps would be to validate the assumptions within the solution by testing the prototype out on real users, and iterating the product with their feedback.