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Lead Product Designer

Agile Iterations

Social Security approach and Income Plan for retirement

KEY LEARNINGS
  • Iterating on a complex app in a discovery process with an Agile trifecta of Designer, Dev lead and Product Manager.
  • Designing for subject matter experts in a contact center.
  • Facilitating research and interviewing end users

This was a year-long Agile project to create a Social Security app for financial retirement advisors. 

We started out with three strategies:

CONTEXT SETTING

INITIAL RESEARCH
I researched a variety of representations of Social Security claiming strategies. Based on the research, I ultimately removed the cash flows and showed only summaries on the main Social Security page. 
  • Personalized: Starting at ages specified by the customer
Once the developers caught up, we added a fourth option:
  • Earliest: Starting at age 62
  • Retirement: Starting at the customer's desired retirement age
  • Consider: Typically starting at age 69 or 70

SOCIAL SECURITY STRATEGIES
The research showed that advisors needed salient customer information at the top of the Social Security page. At launch we supported single, married and partnered customers. Eventually we also supported widowed and divorced customers. 
Based on stakeholder interviews and earlier research, I started out with a card sorting exercise, to find out what the typical flow of conversation was. 

I also showed the financial advisors several designs that stakeholders had suggested and got their feedback on them. This feedback fed into my initial design.