Product Designer & Researcher, Creative Technologist
Client: Northwestern Mutual
Role: Lead Product Designer
Scope: Discovery, Taxonomy, Research, Interaction Design
- Overview
- Northwestern Mutual's financial representatives were building two disconnected pictures of a client's money: an investment allocation drawn only from brokerage and retirement accounts, and a separate pile of insurance, annuity, and pension value that the existing planning tools lacked the functionality to incorporate into an investment strategy.
- I led product design for a new strategy-building tool, Comprehensive Asset Allocation, from discovery through release by facilitating the cross-functional workshops that scoped the tool, developing the controlled vocabulary and color system for a new asset category, and designing both the workspace calculator, data visualization tool and the advisor-facing outputs.
- I worked alongside product, engineering, content strategy, legal, and compliance to replace an informal, non-compliant spreadsheet process with a governed, auditable tool built on existing client data.
Cash that wasn’t
earning it’s keep
If insurance and annuities aren’t represented in the allocation, then the portfolio that the advisor is assessing doesn’t accurately capture the client’s real risk tolerance.
The Brief: Give advisors one tool, built on data the client already had on file, that includes insurance and annuity products as fixed-income alternatives, showing the client’s comprehensive portfolio next to the old investment-only view. As a result, the advisor can responsibly shift cash funds towards equities and the client’s asset allocation accurately reflects their risk tolerance.
Shaping information relationships
before design begins
A staged research plan that shapes the concept
During CAA's discovery phase (called Advanced Optimization, or AO, at the time), the design team worked with UX research and Product to run a series of six research sprints, alternating between sessions with field advisors and with clients. Early sprints tested rough concepts and user flows; later sprints refined the data layout, language, and interactions, and specifically probed where within Northwestern Mutual's digital ecosystystem, which already included mature tools, advisors expected to find this new capability.
Aligning the team with a Lean UX workshop series
The research sprints were paired with and informed by a companion set of workshops (empathy mapping, a Lean UX canvas, story mapping, tech alignment, and a design studio focused on ecosystem touchpoints) that translated the research findings into a formal set of digital ecosystem recommendations.
From home-grown spreadsheets to a working system
Using inputs from the research and workshops, the design team evaluated three architectural approaches: a standalone micro-app integrated with the existing platforms, a lightweight version built directly inside PX, and a fully standalone app with no integrations, weighing each against advisor expectations, existing technical constraints, and the risk of adding yet another disconnected planning tool to an already fragmented experience.
Advisor interviews pointed consistently in one direction: most expected this functionality to live inside the existing platform, since that was already where they built asset allocations and where the client's data already existed. That finding directly shaped the design team's recommendation to launch the new tool from within an existing asset allocation context, so it would inherit the advisor's existing client data automatically and read as a natural extension of a workflow they were already in, rather than one more destination competing for their attention.
One workspace, two ways of asset planning
A new vocabulary for a category that didn’t exist
The tool’s core screen puts a household’s entire account list (brokerage, retirement and insurance) on one line each in a table layout, then the UI let’s the advisor toggle the data visualizations between the Investment-only allocation the client is used to and the Comprehensive allocation that counts everything.
Editing an account without losing the plan
Adjusting one account’s allocation meant exposing it’s full asset class breakdown in a slide-out that previews the changes before it touches the household’s overall solve. This UI encourages the advisor to experiment with percentages of allocations at the individual account level and understand the change’s impact on the entire portfolio, before proceeding to make changes to the account’s trading positions.
Giving held-away assets a fair value
Annuities and pensions purchased through Northwestern Mutual already had a defensible present value. Competitor annuities and outside defined-benefit pensions didn’t. Without these prices, the tool could only tell half of the story of a client’s portfolio. We designed the Net Present Value feature to close that gap, creating an input experience for held-away (outside) assets, payout logic, and mortality-assumptions, so an advisor could test a scenario without disturbing the household’s solved allocation. User Story, written for the engineering team:
“As an advisor, I need an experience that will allow me to preview the Net Present Value results in the slide-out modal without impacting the overall Solver results, then apply the change and pass the updated information through to the Solver calculation when the advisor directs such activity.”
A color system for an asset class that didn’t exist yet
Northwestern Mutual’s design system had a color standard for investment-only asset classes. Previously, “Asset Allocation” had always meant stocks & bonds, but there was no precendent for a new fixed income category that included insurance products. I authored the design point-of-view that extended the existing standard and introduced a new color scheme to address the visual gap. A compliant way to see the client’s whole portfolio
For financial representatives running an integrated practice, it replaced a manual, non-compliant spreadsheet exercise with a single workspace within the financial planning platform they were already using. A single source of truth to see a client’s full portfolioi across insurance, equities and anniuties, providing a competitive advantage for Northwestern Mutual’s financial advisors to responsibly recommend more of their client’s investable dollars go to work in the market.