Charles Schwab Equity Award Center
Project Overview
Charles Schwab wanted to improve their equity award management center product. They hired DesignMap to lead this overhaul in understanding customer needs, pains, and delivering a delightfully easy experience.
Project duration: 7 months in 2015
My role
I was the lead designer on this project and was responsible for executing all aspects including leading user research sessions, industry research, analogous research, brainstorming & testing concepts, creating and iterating on prototypes, leading the visual designer on the strategy, and creating the overall interaction design guide deliverable.
For this project, I worked under a design director who gave process guidance and feedback on the execution of designs.
Results
Additional engagement contract signed with Charles Schwab for DesignMap based on this project
Our client requested to have me as the lead designer on the additional contract
Positive client feedback to Schwab
How we got there
Client kick-off and the domain
Equity and the management of equity is, as you could imagine, a complex space. Our first week of our client engagement consisted of a project kickoff where we learned from Schwab leaders and we did our own digging into competitive experiences and modeled relationships.
Understanding the user
To better empathize and understand who the potential users are in this space, I led research sessions with over 10 different people who got equity from their companies to better understand their relationship with equity and how they think about managing it.
Going broad with ideas
Once I understood the foundations of equity & equity management, I started rapidly sketching various concepts for how equity management and understanding of equity could come to life.
Establishing the overall architecture
Once I had a bunch of ideas, I met with the client to talk about what features they wanted to include in the Award Center. This allowed me to establish the overall architecture of the site and how users would go from A to B.
Bringing concepts to life
Once the architecture was established and we knew what we wanted to include in the site, I brought everything together into wireframes that we could then start to test with users.
Testing with users
Once the wireframes and prototypes were established for key workflows, I led usability sessions at Schwab’s clients’ offices to understand how these concepts were resonating with our end users.
Designing the details
The learnings from the usability sessions allowed us to refine our visual hierarchy and overall flows to improve understanding of equity and improve completion of core flows.
Hand off final designs to our client
This project’s deliverable was in the form of an Interaction Guide to document and detail all information in relation to design with the site. It included the high level strategy of architecture along with detailed interaction designs.