Manulife Case Study

Senior UX Designer

  • Identified design and flow elements to test and helped create user-testing scripts and prototypes.

  • Used research insights to expand project scope from features into a compelling business and customer journey.

  • Designed and strategized solutions that adhere to native Android and iOS standards

Driving member engagement with mobile statements

The Manulife Mobile App for Canadian customers offers a converged solution for group benefits and group retirement products. The app delivers an iOS and Android experience using native design and coding standards.

The main driver of this project came from the need for the mobile channel to offer feature parity with the website portal. Connecting digital statements with the paperless campaign allowed me to deliver conceptual work to move beyond feature delivery and into a comprehensive mobile journey.

I worked alongside a UX researcher to help define scenarios, write scripts, and create prototypes. I then used this insight to expand the project scope to connect a set of features into a compelling offering for our business partners and plan members.

 

Team

4 Developers
1 QA
1 Product Owner
1 UX Researcher

Time

12 months

Challenge

Many clients are still receiving paper statements, and getting them online requires multiple steps. By facing friction, most customers don’t engage with these documents. There’s an opportunity to meet customers on their devices where it’s more convenient, making them more involved with finances, leading to improved customer satisfaction.

Goal

Allow mobile customers to view and manage their statements.

View statements on the mobile app.

Success criteria: Number of users accessing the statements page and downloading them to their mobile device.

Manage delivery settings on the mobile app.

Success criteria: Increase the number of accounts with emails and page views to the delivery settings screen.

Nudge users to switch to paperless statements.

Success criteria: Interaction with nudge banner component. Correlation of paperless conversions with mobile channel.

Business Impact

Although Manulife Investments has yet to release this project in its entirety, customers are now able to manage their delivery preferences. The work we did also was used as the foundation for insights into mobile customers. We shared the learnings from this project among business units and regions, including research and design strategies that empowered work done in the U.S. for the John Hancock Retirement App.

App store increased from 3.7 to 4.4 stars.

This project created many indirect opportunities for improvements that translated to better customer experience.

  • Accessibility

  • Consistency

  • Content

Insight on how to nudge users to new flows.

Acquired foundational knowledge to build out a nudge component that acts as a shortcut to important and timely actions.

  • Tax documents

  • Financial advice

  • Bonus election

A proven process for mobile research.

This project had a direct impact on work for the U.S. retirement app taking it from 2.6 to 4.6 stars.

  • Direction for UI update

  • IA improvements

Research

We set out to understand people’s mental models, expectations, and values surrounding their plan statements.

Fifteen customers with Retirement Saving Plan accounts were recruited through UserTesting. We scheduled 30-minute moderated interviews with customers who have retirement accounts with Manulife or other institutions.


  • 15 minutes of discussions on thoughts and perceptions of digital statements.


  • 15 minutes of guided concept prototype testing.

 

70%

Have access to a single retirement savings account.

80%

Receive their statements via email or the web.

100%

Only review their statements when they are available.

 

Key Prototype Screens

Insights

Saving for retirement is essential, but so are many more immediate aspects of life. People keep tabs on red flags but otherwise expect Manulife to take care of things for them.

Customers perceive financial statements as a comfort artifact and feel uncomfortable if they are unavailable.

Plan engagement evolves over time. It can go from “automatic” to more hands-on the closer customer’s are to their goals.

Customer’s are familiar with the process and concept of opting out of paper statements.

 

Evolving focus

Initially, a person's experience with their Retirement Savings Plans evolves. It starts with unfamiliarity and transitions to a feeling of security and control. Later in life, it becomes more hands-on as they anticipate the payout. Most new customers enter with a blank slate shaped by experience and education.

Members interact with their GR account to accomplish a task that brings them perceived value, usually just one at a time. They typically prefer to focus on their primary job, mainly if uncertain about what comes next.

“I would ignore this full-screen message because I’m just in it to check out my account.”

Snapshots are not a full story

Users might take time to glance at their statements or app as a “snapshot”. Snapshots provide real-time updates but don't show financial performance over time. Customers want to see their journey so far, from the beginning to the future.

While these snapshots serve as a real-time update that might inform short-term investment decisions, they do little to narrate financial performance over time to inform the long-term RSP strategies.

“What I enjoy about my yearly statements is seeing the whole picture of where I started and where I am now.”

 

Keep it familiar

During testing, all users went to the hamburger menu to view their statements and go paperless. This place felt like the obvious choice to them due to familiarity with the pattern in other apps. Most users found what they were looking for under My profile but some didn’t see “Statements” in the hamburger menu options and moved to look elsewhere.

“I usually organize my digital statements in a cabinet with my IDs, and important documents, and that’s why I thought my digital statements would be nested around the same place as “my profile”

There when needed

Digital and paper statement consumers perceive financial statements as an artifact of comfort, a keepsake of truth that won’t necessarily warrant a thorough read-through but will feel uncomfortable with it being unavailable.

“The idea of not knowing where my statements are makes me feel uneasy, and it’s strange because I never check my RRSP statements anyway.”

 

Solution

Nudge don’t push

Our research findings suggested that while the full-screen promotional may seem novel, most members do not interact with it. Therefore, we recommend promoting such content on the home screen as it is noticeable but not intrusive. Additionally, we have identified a practical area for catching the user's attention. We suggested designing a component that contains relevant and timely information like bonus election and tax documents.

Visualize the journey

Users value the ability to check their account balance and growth, whether online or through paper statements. By providing a view that displays growth over time, users are more likely to engage with their financial information. Additionally, projecting future growth can motivate users to stay on track and regularly check the app.

 

Leverage mobile devices

Users could easily navigate to the statement location during our test as the app structure follows conventional patterns. Based on this familiarity, the team expanded the project scope to include native platform handling of the statement PDF files. While the information architecture and labels mostly align with users' expectations, there is an opportunity to dig deeper. The MVP is focused on recent statement access and sharing, and the learnings, design, and technology efforts were shared with the US retirement app.

Make selections clear

Setting delivery preferences is familiar to members as they have done it before with other services. We found low confusion during our observation, but we identified some areas where we could improve the process further. For instance, we kept a close eye on the clarity of the options selected and when they took effect. Additionally, we believe that offering granular control options for notifications when technology becomes available would be an excellent opportunity for improvement.

 

Learnings

Through our research, we have identified two levels of learning that call for distinct approaches. We have people learnings and design learnings. As we gain insight into our varied customers, we still have more work to enhance our research culture, which will benefit future ideas. Additionally, we must delve deeper into the feature's design and work closely with product teams to make it a reality.

Company

Together we can learn a lot about our customers with very little investment.

Team

Sometimes, delays can be opportunities in disguise to build bigger and better.

Personal

Share early and often. The people who care will join the conversation.