Project Background

Charles Schwab is a Fortune 200 company that focuses on personal and commercial banking, as well as wealth management.

In 2020, Charles Schwab acquired TD Ameritrade. With that acquisition, two competing products for financial advisors brought redundancy. My team was given the task to combine the Schwab Advisor Center (SAC) and VeoOne, and improve the experience for all users.

SAC and Veo One screens before

Process

The first step was to understand how our financial advisors used their respective tools.

Through empathy interviews, we discovered that Charles Schwab’s financial advisors used SAC a lot differently compared to TD Ameritrade’s VeoOne. However, we found some common ground as both tools offered the same functionality, albeit in very different forms.

Next, it was time to conduct some competitive analysis. We wanted to see how the Schwab and TD Ameritrade tools compared to what else was out there. We found a wide variety of tools in many shapes, sizes, and styles.

When it came time to ideate, I was given the task of working on the navigation and structure of the page. While VeoOne was fully responsive, SAC was not. After getting some initial feedback from the team and stakeholders, I began to lay out a low fidelity prototype to receive additional feedback from our users. We tested our initial prototype with TD and Schwab users individually with the help of our User Researchers on the team.

While many things worked well, others aspects could have been much better. For the most part, the users were appreciating the enhancements throughout the tool. We took every bit of feedback from this study and as a team we came together to list out what to improve for the next study. Over time, issues were solved and our users were having a much easier time with the updated tool. We continued to test with this set of key users over the course of several months, with many iterations of designs to follow.

 

Sketches

 

Low-Fi Wireframes

Higher Fidelity Designs

Implementing the Design System

Responsive Animation

Quick animation shared with developers to show how the top nav would react to different breakpoints

 

Final Designs

Account Selector shown on all screens

Outcome & Reception

Our users and stakeholders gave us continuous feedback. Many backend improvements are underway to ensure trades happen quickly and accurately. A select group of users have been given access to begin using the new and improved Schwab Advisor Center and Veo One users will transition over to SAC between Spring and Fall of 2023.

 
Mobile User
 

Tools Used

Sketch for design, InVision for prototyping, DSM for design system integration, Usertesting.com for user research.