Creating Australia's first robo-advisor for investments with Macquarie Bank

Background

• In 2015 Macquarie Bank decided it wanted to enter the Robo-Adviser market and launch Australia’s first Robo-Advisor service for investments
• They had watched companies like Betterment and Wealthfront in the U.S market and thought they could repeat their success in the Australian market
• Lead by visionary John O’Connell who had stepped down as Macquarie Bank’s Global Head of Research to lead the project
• Owners Advisory reached out to consultancy firm Squiz for help to bring their product to market

Problems

• Under John, Macquarie Bank built a team of investment specialists to build the first version of Owners Advisory but not of them came from a product design or product management background.
• The team lacked the know-how to turn their ideas into a tangible concept and then evolve this into a launchable product

Objectives

• Lead the Owners Advisory team on a user-centred conceptual design journey that helped them explore who the product was for, what value would the product bring to these customers and what it should feel like to use.
• Provide guidance, structure and leadership to both the team’s leaders and those who would be building the product

Constraints

• Macquarie Bank had an aggressive launch date that only gave the team two months to build, market and release the product
• All development work was to be done within the team but the team lacked front end development experience
• John already had a ‘vision’ for the product in his head which we needed to capture and use as the foundation

Approach

Stakeholder Led Research

John and his team had already studied some similar companies in the US market so we needed to play catch up and get on a level playing field with them. After the project kicked off, we did a competitor analysis of both Betterment and Wealthfront to try and get a better understanding of the market in general and how each product worked. We reviewed each site’s messaging and tried to deduce who each was aimed at, we looked at each platform’s sign up experience to better understand how their tools worked and we also looked at their subscription models and how they charged for the services. 

We then had a very detailed interview with John prior to the first workshop off to capture and dissect his vision. We replayed our findings from the competitor analysis to him and used these as a point of comparison in order to better understand where John wanted to imitate the existing players and where he wanted to be different. This interview not only helped us understand the vision in detail, it also allowed the consultancy team to bond with John and ensure we were aligned with his definition of success.

We then ran a two day workshop for the whole Owners Advisory team where we:

• Formalised what success looked like to ensure we were all aiming for the same thing
• Talked to the team about who they were aiming the product at
• Explored how the product would bring value to those users, what tasks it would facilitate and what goals would the users achieve
• Created a customer value proposition for the new product
• Based on the target users and the Customer Value Proposition, we then explored some options for key messages
• Built up a customer typical customer journey 
• Collaborated on some very loose user interface sketches that would facilitate the journey

These sketches were the output of a collaborative design activity where we explored the pages that would be designed for the first release.

Interaction Design

Myself and another designer then began an iterative design process to produce the first draft of the user interface designs. We progressively enhanced the original sketches by layering in detail with each iteration being shared and discussed with John and the OA leadership team. We focused on the customer journey we explored in the workshop to produce a collection of web designs that would take the user from the home page all the way through to generating a report on their portfolio. This report was the initial product that the service would launch with and then more advanced features such as executing the recommendations would come later. 

During this time I also worked with a content strategist on the launch email campaign and began producing a number of email template designs.

These are a selection of the desktop wireframes produced, we also produced mobile wireframes and html email templates

User Testing

After a week of design iterations we had a draft of the both the launch web application and the email campaign. We conducted user testing using volunteers from around Macquarie Bank making sure we had a broad spectrum of recipients on the scale of investing experience. We did three rounds of testing with each round having six participants. Each day we tested a layout variant for the wireframes and a messaging varient for the emails. We collaborated with John and the team between the rounds to consider the insights and evolve the designs.

We were able to see conversion rates increase each day and by the end of last iterations we felt we had a pretty successful collection of designs.

Visual Design

Once we had our final interaction designs we then worked with a visual designer to translate these into accurate mock ups.

We started the process with a workshop with John and the OA leadership team to understand their tastes for things like imagery and colour palette. We then re-visted the two products that we started with (Betterment & WealthFront) and forensically examined the images they used, the illustration style and palettes.

Based on the outcomes of this workshop two concepts were then produced, one that aimed to capture everything discussed and another where the designer had more poetic license to play. These were presented back to John and the OA leadership team for them to select the aspects of each concept they liked, to select the overall winner and also provide feedback on any changes needed.

With the feedback received the visual designer produced detailed mockups for all the parts of the web app and email campaign we had explored in the interaction designs.

Outcomes

The scope of our work was limited to content design, product design and communications design. The OA team would then take these designs and build out the first release of the product.

Owners Advisory launched in March 2016 and was Australia’s first robo- advice investment platform. The service launched to a warm reception and the team began to build out the more advanced features across a series of releases.

Tragically, John died suddenly in June 2017 and Macquarie Bank shuttered the service folding the IP into their existing wealth management platform.

Reflections

• This was a really enjoyable and rewarding project to be involved with
• The team were true pioneers launching the first service of its kind in Australia
• Yes, the project was waterfall by nature with limited opportunities for iteration exacerbated by a scope of work that did not include the build meaning we were unable to launch a product and iterate based on actual customer behaviour
• Looking back I think having the visual designer on the team from the start and limiting the amount of interaction designs may have delivered more value as we could have explored and discovered more in the same space of time as there would have been less re-work. But the client (John and the OA team) had specifically requested formal specification documents as an output so we would have to mitigate the risks presented by not supplying this specification.
• The lack of a front-end lead engineer at the start of project was a major drawback as we were unable to involve them in the design process
• If this project were starting today then I’d be looking to do a form of design sprint ensuring we had UX, UI and front-end skills present from the start. We would iterate on a working, testable prototype and have more rounds of user testing so that after two weeks we could hand over a mature prototype that could be used as specification without the need to produce lengthy documents.
• Why did I include this project, why am I proud of an old school waterfall project? I now have the experience and expertise to look back on this project and see the inefficiencies and risks we took with limited user involvement but sometimes you don’t get to use the best-practise process, sometimes you have to make the best out of a less than perfect solution and I feel the team did that. John and the OA team were super happy with what was produced and loved the ride we took them on. We had a lot of laughs and I believe that we not only helped the OA team launch a great product but armed them with the knowledge to carry on and continue to be successful long after our team had left. 

Contact

Jules Munford
Phone: 0431 414322
Email: julian.munford@googlemail.com
Twitter: @julesmunford

© Julian Munford 2020