Empowering all 401(k) participant's financial well-being journey
Vanguard, June 2024 - September 2025
Activities
Design thinking, Workshops, Product Requirements Document, User flows, User research, UX, UI
Contributions
I led our UX team (Researcher, Designer, Content Strategist, and Writer) over 14 months to design an enhanced financial wellness assessment, and curated a partnership with a new product and dev team to build a micro front-end (MFE).
Overview
Vanguard’s retirement plan site features a financial wellness offer that aims to educate and guide plan participants towards taking positive actions for their financial well-being. We had a financial wellness assessment that was falling short – capturing attitudes, but missing the full picture of a participants’ financial health. Without that, personalized, action-driven guidance was out of reach. Recognizing this gap, cross-divisional teams came together to explore and build an enhanced financial wellness assessment.
Current state pain points
Partnering with our UX researcher and product manager, I drew out the main pain points our participants were experiencing through new and existing UX research
Limited insight into participant's financial health
Only asking 4 questions limited our ability to capture a holistic view of a participant's financial health, and sequentially to provide meaningful guidance to them.
QUESTION 1
Are you happy with your current financial situation?
QUESTION 2
How many years until you retire?
QUESTION 3
Which of these topics do you want to focus on?
QUESTION 4
How often do you have money left over at the end of the month after you pay your bills?
Insufficient guidance
Participants only received 2 next steps, which are too generic. They voiced needing more personalized, trackable actions to drive real behavior change.
Lack of consistency
There was no unified approach across Vanguard to assess financial well-being, resulting in fragmented experiences and missed opportunities for a shared financial well-being learning and action curriculum.
Financial Wellness (My team)
"
By enhancing our assessment to capture full financial health, we'll unlock tailored, action-driven guidance that empowers participants to improve their financial well-being.
Digital Advisor (Other team)
"
By capturing clients' emotional and financial concerns during enrollment through an assessment, we can personalize action items to boost engagement, CSAT, and retention – transforming advice from one-way communication into a meaningful two-way dialogue.
CX Alpha (Other team)
"
Integrating a financial wellness assessment into the client experience through personalized conversations enables us to meet clients where they are and drive meaningful behavior change.
How might we design a shared financial well-being assessment that reflects participants' overall financial health and empowers multiple divisions to drive meaningful behavior change?
The process
Feasibility assessment: I worked with product managers, methodologists, and other UX reps from 4 teams to define the scope, value we're creating, and impacted areas of the solution.
Product requirements: I mapped out user experience and technical requirements in the form of user stories needed for a scalable, personalized assessment experience in a product requirements document (PRD).
User research: I partnered with our user UX researcher to form a testing plan and theme the results of a test on the new draft assessment questions with 12 users across different financial life stages.
User flows: Our participant base spans from career starters to retirees, all questions were not applicable to everyone. I mapped out user flows to ensure the right participant groups got assessed on the right questions given their financial life stage.
Next best action mapping: I created a hierarchy of user-specific actions based on assessment responses in partnership with the methodology team. I would then map these actions to the supporting resources we had available, noting gaps we have where they appeared.
Design and content iteration: I led our UX team through low to hi-fidelity designs featuring modern UI, intuitive navigation, and clear content. All updates made were rooted in product requirements and addressing top user pain points (mentioned above).
Usability testing: I partnered with our UX researcher again to create a test plan and theme results of a usability test on the new hi-fidelity prototypes. I took findings to the lead product manager to debate changes to include in our MVP launch.
Micro front-end (MFE) build: Our UX team collaborated with the dev team to turn our designs into a functional MFE aligned with the intended user experience.
Building the future: I hosted a series of cross-functional and divisional workshops to ideate on future features and capabilities to continue enhancing the assessment experience. These were handed off to product for 2026 prioritization and funding discussions.
The solution
Pain point: Limited insight into participant's financial health
Holistic participant assessment
We can now assess the participant across the 4 pillars of financial well-being (Defined in Vanguard's Guide to financial wellness white paper) to gain an accurate picture of where they stand financially:
Financial objectives
Cashflow
Emergency savings
Debt
Account types
Meeting the match
Social security
Retirement spending
Pain point: Insufficient guidance
Personalized results and next steps
We first familiarize the user with how they will find their next steps after leaving the results page.
Next step cards break down positive actions a participant can take into incremental and personalized actions.
Advice on-ramp that will take a user directly to an enrollment flow based on their eligibility and answer choice.
Pain point: Insufficient guidance
Personalized results and next steps
Next steps are no longer generalized, with them now being broken down into more focused and personalized actions a participant can take, based on their situation.
Pain point: Lack of consistency
Shared framework and UI
A shared micro front-end now maintained in a central location allows for multiple offers to adopt and offer a common assessment to it's users, with customization offered where needed.
Lessons learned and next steps
This project underscored the importance of designing around real user needs—particularly within the financial record-keeping space, where information can often feel overwhelming or inaccessible. We learned that when users aren’t sure how to begin their financial wellness journey, they’re far less likely to engage at all. This highlighted the need for intuitive design, clear guidance, and ongoing iteration informed by user feedback.
Looking ahead, we’re focused on enhancing personalization through data-informed insights, aligned with divisional priorities. We’re also actively exploring AI integration to introduce more conversational, human-like interactions—laying the foundation for a financial well-being AI agent. These efforts aim to keep Vanguard at the leading edge of digital innovation in the record-keeping industry.