MetLife, one of the largest insurance providers, came to Oliver Wyman with a question: How could they create lifelong relationships directly with customers through offering new products and services that focused on Financial Wellness? Our initial phase of vision work would be spent exploring this question and the various ways we could approach solving it.
In partnership with Lippincott, we started off understanding the opportunity and need space by doing extensive research through the jobs to be done methodology, which helped us to holistically understand the users we were solving for, what their priorities were and the pain points in their lives that stopped them from making progress in their financial lives. This research was the backbone for all of our vision and concept work.
With a firm understanding of the research and our users, we had extensive co-ideation sessions with MetLife, we developed a series of very low-fidelity wireframes that we tested with customers over a 3-week period. Through this process we were able to understand what financial wellness features were desirable for customers.
We wanted to be bold with our concepts and really explored what financial wellness could look like in the digital age.
Our explorations ranged from Splurge Control a concept that helps users stop spending on frivolous items by tracking and ”taxing” the expenses you they want to curb. to Dynamic Duo a mediation framework to help couples navigate difficult financial conversations.
Once we had a strong understanding of the initial concepts that were tested, we went forward with nine concepts to iterate on and build out as medium fidelity prototypes with modifications and enhancements based off what we heard from customers.
After user testing, we narrowed the concepts down to 3-core concepts that we would move forward with.
Our task now was to create a holistic experiencial approach that would incorporate all 3 concepts into a cohesive prototype that would be presented to the C-Suite execs within MetLife to secure funding for additional phases of work.
The concepts we focused on were Dynamic Duo, a financial mediation tool for couples; Ripple Effect, a tool for creating and managing a budget based off trade-offs; Your Year In Review, a summary of all of the financial progress you've made.
Concurrently with testing, another team had been developing an emerging visual system. We applied the system to our wireframes and user flows and were proud of the results but the team ultimately decided we should go with a different visual direction.
We wanted the prototype to feel friendlier and be personalize through contextual and conversational elements to reflect the target audience we were focused on, young families.
We reworked all of the visuals, and worked with Lippincott to develop ownable illustrations for the prototype. Lastly, we brought in emoji's to liven up the overall experience.
We finished and presented the prototype to the President of U.S. Business at MetLife and other stakeholders. The progress and the work of this phase secured and lead to a multi-year engagement with MetLife.
