Product Design: Aviva Wealth App

Timeframe: 18 months

Objective

The Aviva Wealth app aimed to provide a native mobile app experience to direct wealth customers, meaning customers who held investment products like Self-Invested Personal Pensions, ISAs and General Investment Accounts, with Aviva directly. The current customer experience had existing limitations being desktop web based only and on another platform external to Aviva. Consequently, the Aviva Wealth app was created as a React Native mobile app to bring our customer experiences closer to us and create more market-leading features helping customers to manage their collective wealth. I joined the programme after initial discovery, app information architecture and the design of the core home screen, however it was still a very new app concept. I therefore got to work on the first journeys delivered to customers through the mobile app experience which was super exciting!

I worked as the single product designer in the first mobile app squad (before other squads were established) which included delivering 6 new mobile app journeys to buy/transfer products, additions to the home screen, additions to product screens and the inclusion of a wealth “hub” space to find products and services. This role was primarily UX/UI work as well as contributing to the maintenance of an evolving design system and leading user testing sessions. I also took an active role with OKR workshops and maintaining the product backlog.

Some of our key objectives for this work included:

• To increase the number of pensions transferred into an Aviva Self-Invested Personal Pension through the mobile app, and therefore increase the £ value of pensions held with Aviva.

• To increase the number of Investment ISA accounts opened through the mobile app.

• To provide a quick and simple way for customers to find out what other pension accounts they held externally and if they could transfer these to Aviva.

• To increase overall engagement with Aviva wealth products, increasing the amount of logins each year (historically on web) to a higher number of visits to the wealth mobile app each month.

• To provide an easier way for customers to manage their wealth products, including viewing their portfolio valuations, changing direct debit amounts and buying or selling investments with ease.

• Provide a way for customers to see their total wealth across pensions, investments and savings.

Approach

Although not my first time working in financial services, it was my first time working in investment wealth products so first of all I had a lot of learning to tackle through reading Aviva Wealth documentation, signing up as a customer myself to Aviva & competitors, and watching YouTube videos. For 18 months I continuously monitored competitor wealth apps to see what was coming onto the market to help customers manage their investments and future wealth and worked closely with product owners and business stakeholders to refine the product roadmap. My work involved continuous discovery activity and design delivery work:

The discovery work I led for this project included:

• Competitor research: for each new product we focused on (eg. SIPP, ISA, General Investments) exploring competitor apps for market leading features and easy sign-up or transfer experiences.

• Running design thinking activities in the form of product/design workshops, brainstorming and co-design sessions.

• Reviewing existing web platform journeys and customer feedback to develop feature ideas.

• Reviewing previous user research for wealth and pensions to extract key insights.

• Working with user researchers to establish new wealth research where needed.

• Where needed, running design sprints to test new feature ideas in the form of stimuli and wireframes.

The design work I led for this project included:

• Initial wireframes and user flows for each new journey.

• Running co-design sessions with the design team and design reviews with key stakeholders.

• Working closely with business analysts to explore approaches and data requirements.

• Performing user testing and communicating results, iterating on designs.

• Documenting complex user flows and accessibility specifications.

• Reviewing user stories and acceptance criteria to ensure design alignment.

• Delivering final mobile designs and iPad designs in Figma.

• Delivering final clickable prototypes to maintain a constant view of our live and upcoming features.

• Briefing developers on new designs in refinement sessions.

• Updating design system components, specifications and accessibility notes & reviewing these with other mobile app designers for consistency.