Executives here are very interested in design. When I met with our CEO, he said, ‘You don’t have to sell me on design.’ So we are fortunate in that respect. It’s the best company I’ve ever been at in terms of senior level buy-in.
Abigail Hart Gray
VP Head of Design, Northwestern Mutual
Start with a small win
Design is about many things; I believe in the business context, design can be about winning. My goal for our clients is that if they follow their financial plan, they feel they’re winning at life.
Abigail Hart Gray
VP Head of Design, Northwestern Mutual
In 2015, Northwestern Mutual acquired fintech startup LearnVest, which helped accelerate the company’s transformation to create a leading digital client experience. With strong support for design from company leaders, the LearnVest team began to integrate with the larger Northwestern Mutual organization and started to build relationships with team members on both campuses. Instead of a large, important project, Abigail Hart Gray decided to do something counterintuitive and start small.
If you start with something high value, there’s a risk that you might mess it up. And they don’t know you, haven’t worked with you before, and if it’s not a company where everybody is bought in, it can be really scary because you don’t have the relationships to fall back on.
Abigail Hart Gray
VP Head of Design, Northwestern Mutual
Abigail went to one of the executives and asked what he cared about. One thing he mentioned was that he wanted customers to aggregate their outside accounts. She looked into the analytics and saw that the bounce rate for this dashboard was not optimal.
At this point, her team was small, so she did the design work herself—with two product managers and three engineers—and relaunched in six weeks. There was no new functionality, and it was purely a UX and design copy overhaul. After six weeks, they had a 300+ percent increase in account aggregation, and the bounce rate went down by 86 percent.
So if you start with something with smaller value, there’s not a large risk to anybody. If you start with something of high value, people are going to be more resistant to change because you haven’t proven that you can do amazing things yet.
Abigail Hart Gray
VP Head of Design, Northwestern Mutual
We've had smart positioning within the company. I credit Abigail with most of that. In the very beginning, she chose projects that would clearly demonstrate the powerful effects of design. On the vision level, she paints a picture of where the company needs to go, and then on the performance level, demonstrates where design can affect the most important KPIs.
Lesley Fleishman
Group Experience Director, Northwestern Mutual
Growing quickly
It’s an exceptional time for any designer—not just our designers—to be in house and part of the company’s transformation. In the past, you had to really argue the value of design within a Fortune 500 company. But now, the best design talent is coming in house, and large companies know this is how we should work. So it’s just doing the hard work of actually transforming a company without the burden of persuading people of its value.
Lesley Fleishman
Group Experience Director, Northwestern Mutual
Once the design team began to demonstrate their value, the company doubled down on their investment and the design team grew quickly. However, they didn’t let this rapid growth become a barrier to hiring the best people.
Everyone we’re bringing in, from the intern to the director level, are highly sought after designers. We look for well-rounded, talented designers who will complement the team and each other. We have a lot of variation even within the UX teams.
Lesley Fleishman
Group Experience Director, Northwestern Mutual
Many of the designers have agency backgrounds and have a shared understanding of design process. Growing a design team by 10 times in two years would be a challenge for a hot tech startup and is even tougher for a company in a mature vertical like financial services.
Becoming domain experts
As part of the design team’s emphasis on connecting with the client, many employees, including designers and writers, take a certified para-planner course that gives them a fundamental understanding of financial planning. With this knowledge as a foundation, writers and copy editors create guidelines that help unify the voice of the company and ensure messaging is on point.
Encouraging domain expertise, this helps writers and designer think about the impact of the advice they’re offering in the digital experience they are creating. Another way that the design team creates domain expertise is by assigning design directors to specific digital products in the portfolio.
We’ve gotten to the scale where now we have UX leads and UX directors, very senior, very talented designers on our teams that do a lot of directing the design.
Lesley Fleishman
Group Experience Director, Northwestern Mutual
Deep collaboration
The design team at Northwestern Mutual also believes strongly in the power of interdisciplinary collaboration. They make extensive use of cross-functional workshops with design and product partners. Workshop topics run the gamut from information architecture to sketching to user flows.
Workshops are good for getting people’s buy-in. And if they’re part of the process, you’re also making use of that valuable knowledge that’s stuck in their heads, which designers may not know.
Abigail Hart Gray
VP Head of Design, Northwestern Mutual
In one recent workshop, designers, tech leads, and even a Certified Financial Planner explored how to make financial data visualizations less intimidating for customers. After ideating on a range of visualizations across 12 financial concepts, workshop participants voted on which ones to test further. Then those visuals were subject to a round of quantitative and qualitative research to test comprehension as well as more subjective perceptions.
We had a product owner who’s telling you the numbers the algorithm can generate. We had a visual designer thinking of how to represent those numbers on the page. We had a writer, and we had at least one financial planner in the room, usually two, explaining what the advice should be.
Joseph Farrell
Group Copy Director, Northwestern Mutual
Process
1. Discovery - Brand new digital platforms or features often start with a discovery phase, including formative research in the form of ethnographies and surveys. There is an emphasis on a combination of qualitative + quantitative research + analytics (the “data love triangle”).
A/B testing is great for small optimizations, but if you need a revolution, you don’t find that in an A/B test, even if you run 100 of them at a time.
Abigail Hart Gray
VP Head of Design, Northwestern Mutual
2. Concepting & testing - The next phase involves concepting and testing, often using InVision prototypes or sometimes more complex, coded interactive prototypes. Divergent concepts are tested with users, and at this point, there needs to be stakeholder agreement on whether the new design is solving the problem before the project moves forward.
We want to be sure that at the end of the line, final copy ends up in InVision screens, so that becomes the record for anyone building the product. Everyone needs to see the copy where it belongs.
Joseph Farrell
Group Copy Director, Northwestern Mutual
3. Detailed design - During detailed design, the UX and Visual teams own the informational architecture and flow for the project. Usability testing for the new features happens during this phase as well. The build phase overlaps with detailed design.
4. Piloting - An MVP is shipped to a segment of the population, accompanied by follow-up research. This research is mirrored with people not in the pilot for comparison. QA time with the engineering teams is a critical part of the whole process.
When I don’t see QA as part of the design process, I get really nervous. I sat down with the head of QA and created a Design QA process together. I did this to get buy-in, to make sure we’re part of the process. Everybody gets it; there’s never resistance, there is sometimes a lack of awareness.
Abigail Hart Gray
VP Head of Design, Northwestern Mutual
5. Incremental launch - The product or feature is launched to progressively larger and larger audiences.
One of the unique aspects of joining a team like this is that you get to participate in defining our design culture and our design process. We’re still working on it and codifying it and changing it.The future is a process we’ll establish together in partnership with engineering.
Lesley Fleishman
Group Experience Director, Northwestern Mutual
Org design
A centralized team structure keeps all product designers on the same team in a shared space. Some refer to this as the “agency model” or a “center of excellence” as other teams come to the centralized design team for their services—much like the way a client would approach an agency. Centralized design teams work in a shared studio space where work can be posted and discussed regularly, which helps designers grow in their craft.
- Design at the top - VP Head of Design Abigail Hart Gray reports into Northwestern Mutual’s executive vice president – chief client officer and sits as a peer to product management heads under the VP of Product + Design, which enables her to develop peer relationships with leaders across the portfolio.
- Design in the middle - Group directors of verticals such as Visual Design, Copy, and UX oversee the managers of teams of designers, copywriters, and researchers.
Pros
- Frequent feedback from peers fosters growth and engagement.
- It’s easier to create a unified user experience across products and platforms.
- Centralized teams can create a grand vision for a product, and build a design culture.
- With a centralized organization, leaders can better identify opportunities for career development and advancement.
Cons
- Design can be opaque and less collaborative across functions when it’s centralized.
- Designers may leave important collaborators like engineers out of the ideation process in this structure, which can create political conflict.
- Design teams are often disconnected from technical requirements when they’re isolated from engineers.
Some designers are more completely embedded in portfolios: Client facing and products for our financial advisors have a set of directors owning those portfolios.
Lesley Fleishman
Group Experience Director, Northwestern Mutual
Overall, Northwestern Mutual are centralized as a design team and much like an agency, try to resource the right designers at the right time.
But as the team has grown, there was a need for some designers to be more embedded in certain product areas.
Tool Stack
How Northwestern Mutual uses InVision
- Concept validation
- Socializing design concepts
- Copywriting validation
- Documenting product iterations
- Measuring team performance (see quote below).
We use InVision as one way to measure team performance, via the number of screens that are shared and commented on.
Abigail Hart Gray
VP Head of Design, Northwestern Mutual
We use InVision not only for prototyping, but also for some of our note taking. We also use it to document different product iterations.
Lesley Fleishman
Group Experience Director, Northwestern Mutual
Northwestern Mutual is the marketing name for The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee WI and its subsidiaries.