T. Rowe Price

Empowering retail investors to manage their 401(k) with confidence.

T. Rowe Price’s 401(k) service for retail investors relied heavily on support calls for account management, including distributions. Investors often felt guilty or discouraged when making withdrawals, and the process lacked financial wellness support.

The goal was to create a self-service platform that empowered investors to manage their 401(k) accounts while providing guidance and support to minimize the negative impact of withdrawals.

A two-day product design workshop bringing together customers and stakeholders

I led a comprehensive two-day product design workshop, based on a modified form of the Google Ventures design sprint. We co-created with a diverse range of customers, designers, engineers, stakeholders, SMEs, and product managers.

Teams mapped the end-to-end investor journey — from evaluating options through finalizing a withdrawal — using Jobs-to-be-Done frameworks to uncover the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of each decision point.

Educational content and tools to understand the impact of withdrawals

Key concepts included a self-service platform for managing 401(k) accounts including distributions, educational content and tools to help investors understand the impact of withdrawals and explore alternatives, personalized financial wellness support and goal-setting features, and emotionally supportive language and design elements.

Discovering and fixing discoverability issues in real time

Regular tests were run to confirm or falsify hypotheses under consideration. In one instance, the team realized that users may not even have known where to look for the starting point of the flow.

Based on that learning, they quickly pivoted to address discoverability issues, restructured some of the IA on the sitewide nav, and changed terminology to be less jargon-laden — such as changing ‘take a distribution’ to ‘take a withdrawal.’

Contributing to the company-wide enterprise design system

Because I served as both a UX design lead and a Senior Manager, I played an active role in contributing to the company-wide enterprise design system. My team met with several of the other design chapters across the innovation lab on a weekly basis, coordinating to ensure that every innovation could benefit the whole group.