Case Study:Edward Jones - Edward Jones Starting Point Application

Stack: Sketch | Figma | Vue.js

A collage of the starting and ending screens of the Edward Jones Starting Point quiz experience. — Start Quiz and Quiz Results pages from the "Edward Jones - Starting Point" application.

At a Glance:

Driving Client Acquisition and Assets Under Care by Designing and Building Lead Generation Application MVP.

Increased Assets Under Care by $600M+

Increased New Client Relationships by 3,000+

The Opportunity Space

Building on insights gained from extensive customer research, the Edward Jones Brand and Marketing division launched a collaborative Design Thinking engagement facilitated by the design firm, IDEO, to explore new ways to connect with exisiting and prospective clients.

As the CX Design Lead on the project, I worked closely with IDEO facilitators and a cross-functional team of Edward Jones domain experts to ideate, prototype, and test multiple concepts with users over several rounds of iteration.

Design Thinking concept artifacts. — Early concepts generated during the Design Thinking phase of the initiative.

From Design Thinking Concept to Client Acquisition Tool

Early on, I leveraged the Sketch UI toolkit for the firm's enterprise design system, AXIOM, to rapidly prototype multiple rounds of application screens for various concepts and conducted user interviews to gain insights and feedback to inform subsequent iterations.

One concept in particular sought to address a problem space that surfaced with significant frequency in early rounds of interviews with investors. Time and again, we heard that people either didn't know what financial advisors did, didn't know how or if an advisor could help them, or if they were even "qualified" to work with an advisor based on the amount of investable assets they had.

Following several rounds of iteration and testing, we honed our concept for an application that would consider an investor's family, lifestyle and financial details and provide them with a list of financial steps that might benefit them and, critically, how an Edward Jones financial advisor might assist them in pursuing these steps. Upon completing the questionnaire, investors would be supplied with a place to start in a conversation with an advisor, and we named the tool Starting Point.

Early stage prototype screens for user testing. — Early low fidelity prototypes allowed us to rapidly iterate the concept to respond to user feedback.

Building the Vue.js MVP with IDEO

As the Design Thinking engagement neared its end, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the closure of Edward Jones branch locations. A small number of promising Virtual Business Enablement product concepts developed by the CX teams were selected by company leadership to enter into an accelerated Minimum Viable Product phase, one of which was Starting Point.

During a two-week sprint, I partnered with IDEO Designers, Engineers and Data Scientists to build the MVP. We moved the design prototype into Figma to accommodate IDEO and I assisted in establishing fidelity to the Edward Jones Brand and AXIOM design system standards, as well as the design language developing in the concurrent edwardjones.com redesign project. I developed and styled the Vue.js components used to compose the front-end page templates which would integrate with the Python back-end logic.

Driving Impact

Following the success of the MVP in helping to connect prospective clients to Edward Jones financial advisors during a time of unprecedented upheaval, the firm stood up a dedicated product team to move the application from Vue/Python to a React/Java application.

To date, Starting Point has created over 3,000 new Edward Jones client relationships, bringing over $600M in assets under care into the firm.

Visit the live site: Starting Point