I was the design lead on this 0-to-1 launch of a new product: an investment account for kids. I managed one in-house and two agency product designers.
Fabric by Gerber Life, which operated exclusively in the life insurance/estate planning space, wanted to branch into fintech with a new product: an investment account for kids that allows a custodian to invest on behalf of their child while they're minors.
We only had 8 months to design and develop a new product in a new industry with unknown constraints.
To mitigate, we cut scope for launch to MVP-critical features only.
We had a limited in-house team of 1 PM, 2 designers, and 8 engineers split between 2 products.
To mitigate, we worked with an agency providing dev and design resources for 4 months.
We had to work with new vendors who each had their own requirements to move/hold money.
Balanced vendor requirements with UI/UX, to ensure a smooth user experience overall.
Doing business in a highly regulated industry meant many rounds of Legal review and UAT testing.
Worked closely with Legal and Compliance to ensure designs met regulatory standards.
Market analysis, competitive audit, and user interviews
Feature mapping, user journey, information architecture
Low / mid / high fidelity design iterations
Coding and design review with the Engineering team
Soft launch to family & friends for bug testing, then launch in market
As an organization, we worked with a market research agency to analyze market trends based on our target demographic (middle market Millennial parents) and identify product expansion opportunities.
Outcome: An investment account for kids was identified as the top new product that our users would be interested in.
We ran a competitive audit of 9 fintech companies’ user dashboard experiences to identify common features and patterns that users would expect to see.
6 MVP features that users expect to see:
User interviews helped us identify our target user and their needs, and determine how to best position the product experience to them.
Key learnings:
Given the tight timeline, we ended up cutting scope and running user interviews post-launch. I’m including it here because this is ideally when we would have done them.
Working with Product and Engineering, we identified the key features in each section of the account experience, and prioritized them by Phase 1 (MVP), Phase 2 (fast follows), and Phase 3 (optimization).
Working with Product and Engineering, we mapped out how this new product would sit in the overall Fabric ecosystem, then pared it down to an MVP version to start, to help Engineering prioritize their workload.
Outcomes:
Below are wireframe iterations exploring how information should be presented on the main product dashboard page. I explored several iterations, some showing more information on the dashboard v. less information. I knew that I wanted to lead with a chart visual: not only was it a common pattern that we saw in our competitive audit, the team and I felt that it was a strong trust-building element—this was later confirmed via user testing. From a UX perspective, the team felt that the top level experience should show a summary view only, and focus on the key actions we want a user to perform (i.e.: make a contribution, give a gift), so as not to overwhelm the user.
Now that we had the parent page designed, we needed to lay out the child pages according to the architecture that we had discussed with Product and Engineering. Because this project was ever-changing, we working closely with Product to update designs when new information or requirements were presented.
This was the final dashboard that went into prod. It was a highly cross-functional effort between Design, Product, and Engineering to balance UI/UX and dev resources to hit the aggressive launch timing.
Due to the complexity of this product launch, the team and I worked hand-in-hand with Engineering, as we needed to understand the constantly changing technical constraints. This was certainly not a linear process—it was more like one of those detective maps with all the string criss-crossing everywhere. Because this was a new industry with many constraints, we were learning as we went, with Engineering working on the backend while Design mapped out the frontend experience.
How we managed the unknown:
Successfully launched new product on-time!
📝 Prioritize more time early on for proper product discovery and user interviews
📝 Don’t skip due diligence just to hit a timeline
