Investor Onboarding

Summary

After establishing a new strategic relationship with National Bank, Nest Wealth made the decision to rebuild their core retail investing application, leveraging more modern capabilities. As part of that initiative we looked to recreate our investor onboarding workflow to create a better self-led experience.

Company

NestWealth

Role

User Research, UX Design, Design System

Timeline

3 months

Project Goals

  • Develop an entirely new visual language that could be tailored to specific client needs
  • Create a responsive experience to align with modern user banking practices
  • Support both simple and complex investment scenarios with dynamic content
  • Ensure compliance with WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards

Discovery

  • User feedback analysis
  • Competitive analysis
  • Stakeholder interviews

The maturity of the existing Nest Wealth application meant that we had plenty of user feedback to review and reflect on to inform this new iteration. Partnering with our CX team, we worked to better understand some of the most impactful concerns our clients had raised and coordinated a full day workshop to uncover additional insights and further align our group.

During this phase, I also conducted a thorough competitive analysis to understand the product offerings and UI patterns utilised by other B2B and B2C investment products. The team also worked closely with our new strategic partners to understand the problems they were looking to address with this product and understand the business goals that had led to this partnership.

Definition

All of this information helped our team understand the full scope of the problem space and clearly identify the intent of our initial release.

  • Build a responsive design that would work equally well across desktop, tablet, and mobile experiences to support our users
  • Use common language to explain the process and eliminate jargon or technical terminology where possible
  • Streamline account opening by pre-populating data either through existing client data or advisor supported pre-filling
  • Start with a subset of account types that would support the majority of account openings

Ideation

We elected to go with a traditional stepped wizard for the onboarding form. This experience has come to be expected for financial onboarding and allowed us to break the large body of questions down into more manageable chunks for users. With this decision made, the ideation focused on a few specific areas:

  • Ways to clearly communicate progress
  • Defining a form layout system to ensure consistency and scalability
  • Developing form field patterns that were intuitive and accessible

Solution

By building off of Google’s Material UI library we created a simple onboarding workflow that aimed to address each of the goals outlined at the start of the project.

  • Each of interactive elements are aligned with accessibility best practices and provide an intuitive experience on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices
  • The form layout rules make it easy to modify or create new workflows that are consistent and easy to navigate
  • The designs were supported with a newly developed design system that was customizable based on client needs

Creating a "white-label" design system

While this project was developed with a specific client in mind, a primary goal of the project was to build this new product in a way that made it easy to apply other clients' brand standards to create a seamless experience. 

With this in mind, we developed a “white-label” design system. This system introduced a two level token system that allows us to customize a relatively small number of inputs based on brand guidelines, populate the entire product with those changes, and make any adjustments needed quickly and easily.

Results

My journey with NestWealth ended prior to the launch of their NestWealth Pro product. Nest Wealth was acquired by ObjectWay in January of 2024.