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MUTUAL FUND RESEARCH TOOL
THE PROBLEM
The old mutual fund screener was 10 years old and built with technology the company no longer supported. We needed to make it modern while creating an inviting tool for customers browsing mutual funds.
HIGH LEVEL TIMELINE
MAKE OF THE TEAM
Our four-person design team worked on this over two months.
We had a design lead, a content strategist (me), a senior designer, and a junior designer.
KEY GOAL
Modernize the screener and increase account opens.
MY ROLE
I conducted extensive competitive research, user testing, and analytics research on the existing tool. Then I created a new information architecture and worked with designers to prototype and test it.
I also partnered with legal to ensure compliance in this heavily regulated area.
UNDERSTANDING THE USER
Investors visiting T. Rowe Price's website are independent and self-directed. However, they want curation, guidance, and easily digestible information.
We needed to accommodate both experienced investors and those new to investing. Finance has long been a complex and intimidating realm for individual investors, and T. Rowe Price is dedicated to helping investors figure things out and feel more confident.
While long-time customers had grown used to the existing mutual fund screener, many new customers -- especially younger customers used to modern presentation on other sites -- found the existing screener cluttered and overwhelming.
Our goal was to organize the information so that it was easy to find the data users were looking for without getting lost or intimidated.
This was the old mutual fund screener.
The layout was cluttered, and legal disclaimers were not dynamic, so all disclaimers showed for every fund, whether or not they applied.
The tabbed layout meant you had to jump back and forth to compare information.
BREAKING DOWN THE PROCESS
An in-depth competitive review showed that T. Rowe Price's tool provides many more types of data than most other mutual fund companies. But its labeling and organization didn't always resonate with users.
It turns out many mutual fund companies are moving away from showcasing tabular fund screeners as they begin to show more curated lists of funds to novice investors. Our business and marketing stakeholders felt that we could differentiate to our core self-directed customer by maintaining an in-depth research tool -- as long as it was clean and easy to use.
I created a few variations on a new information architecture for the tool while my team's designers worked on different designs. We began to test prototypes internally and using usertesting.com. We also redesigned the filtering functionality and options.
We hit a large roadblock when our legal partner told us certain data points trigger the requirement to show multiple additional pieces of information as well. Fitting this into a responsive table became our main challenge as we raced toward our deadline.
MAJOR FINDINGS
Readability and accessibility trump aesthetics.
As much as we wanted to create a sophisticated, beautiful tool, in the end what matters most is a clean, spacious layout that lets users find what they're looking for on desktop or mobile. The resulting design involves a lot of white space!
Users focus on what matters to them.
Again, it may seem obvious, but users want to see the information they're looking for. For the most part, they don't care what else is there.
Nudging people toward what might matter to many investors is not a high priority with this type of tool.
Start with your biggest constraints.
Starting with mobile means you really have to prioritize the information and capabilities that matter most. Then, when you add legal considerations, it gets really tricky!
It's important to root out the biggest constraints early on so that you don't waste time.
TITLE OF THE CALLOUT BLOCK
PROJECT OUTCOMES
We redesigned the mutual fund research tool as part of a larger mutual fund section redesign. In our A/B testing, the redesigned tool led to an 8% increase in account openings. Mobile results were even higher. Since rolling out to 100% of traffic, we are seeing increased account openings.
We received positive reactions to the tool from online customer feedback, although some long-time users did not like the changes because they had to relearn where to find things.
We also saw significant internal improvements based on the updated technology. For one thing, building the tool on a new platform meant that we could use Adobe Target to A/B test, which wasn't possible before.
We were also able to create dynamic legal disclaimers, which is great for page load times, user cognition, and future tech changes. I helped our business analyst document the logic needed so that our back-end developers could automate when to show which disclaimers. This is also helpful for the mutual fund comparison tool that we also redesigned.