Streamlined Enrollment into a Managed 401k

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While at Fidelity I was asked to help shorten the enrollment process into a managed 401k. The product team was interested in reducing drop-offs during enrollment, and assumed that making the process shorter would lead to more people completing it. They already had a proposal for a simplified sign-up flow that they wanted feedback about. An important note is that managed accounts are premium offer; customers pay an extra fee to have their account pro-actively managed based on their specific needs. This includes things like monitoring market conditions, and rebalancing when appropriate.

I always distinguish between business objective and research objective. While the business objective was clear, it was not obvious what research would best support it - or even that the product team’s assumption that shorter = better was accurate. So I began with something exploratory and open-ended, to get a sense of how people thought about both the current and shorted sign-up process.

What we found was that when signing up for a managed account, people actually wanted to give us more information. The shorted sign-up form made people think that the account wasn’t that personalized after all, because we hadn’t gathered enough information about their preferences and needs.

Based on this discovery I proposed and conducted new research to understand what information they wanted us to know about them, and how accurately they felt they could report it. This led to some interesting and actionable findings, however the product team was not interested in continuing and so the research concluded.

Better Philadelphia Challenge

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Four former classmates and I entered the Better Philadelphia Challenge in October 2015. This year the challenge was to imagine a healthy future for the greater Belmont/Mantua neighborhood, specifically answering the question:

As part of this neighborhood's development, what physical design interventions could encourage healthy and active lifestyles, thereby improving public health among residents?

After exploring the neighborhood and talking to residents our team observed that there are already so many people--residents and non-residents--working hard to make the community better. There are programs to address nutrition, physical health, mental health, financial health and more, but these programs are not living up to their potential.

Rather that create a physical design to sit alongside these many existing solutions, we chose to address what we saw as the real barrier to healthy, active lifestyles: trust and communication between community members and the people trying to serve them. In addition to building trust, we also developed an awareness campaign to make sure everyone in the community knew about and had access to the many helpful services that already exist. 

See our entry by clicking the image above, or clicking here

EatBook

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Capstone project investigating how to improve not just what we eat, but also why and how we eat. How might we encourage people to sit and enjoy meals together with a focus on food and each other, rather than the myriad distractions and interruptions of modern life? 

Food is a reflection of its environment, deeply tied to time, place, and culture. As such it is the perfect medium through which to study and understand the world. The EatBook series uses food at a platform to engage, educate, and entertain. Fun and interesting content helps families take a needed break from their busy lives to enjoy the moment and each other.

History: Why are IPAs so hoppy, and what do they have to do with India?
Geography: Why are tropical cuisines replete with spices and heat?
Science: How does yeast work compared to chemical leaveners?
Holidays: How did common holiday foods come to be?

Make it Personal

EatBook content is a springboard to meaningful conversations about your own family’s experiences, thoughts, and perspectives, bringing you closer together.

The Karate Kid Moment

Reflections on being a member of the inaugural class of the Strategic Design MBA at Philadelphia University

I work full time. I travel regularly. I have a 6-month old son. And I’m a student in the inaugural cohort of the Strategic Design MBA program at Philadelphia University. I chose to be a part of this class in part because I loved the idea of being involved in its creation and development, and because I saw so many applications of design to all aspects of my life. In the beginning I imagined the many ways I would be involved beyond the classroom: campus events, networking opportunities, regular discussions with my co-workers about what I was learning and how we could bring design thinking to our business.

I’m not ashamed to admit that despite my good intentions I’ve had my head down for much of the program, focused more on completion than application. The courses move quickly; at times it feels like they’re over in an instant, and then we’re on to the next. I wondered if things were sinking in sufficiently, if I would truly bring something different to the table after graduation than before I began. I no longer wonder, as I recently had my Karate Kid Moment.

In the 1984 classic, Mr. Miyagi’s unorthodox training program has young Daniel doing a number of tasks that seem unrelated to mastering the martial arts. He begrudgingly obliges, but doesn’t quite see the point. Until he does. Daniel’s Karate Kid Moment came when he was ready to quit and Mr. Miyagi showed him that “wax on, wax off” wasn’t just about polishing cars. Mine came recently upon taking a new role at work.

I was recently put in charge of a new group. We are accountable for taking years of research and ideas and turning them into tangible products and services for our clients. As soon as I had my new objective the path forward was obvious—and nothing like it would have been 14 months ago before I began the Strategic Design MBA. Without fully realizing it, design thinking has taken root. I may not remember every detail, model, and theory, but there’s no doubt that I approach challenges differently. In particular two words came to mind which have shaped every action taken since, and for me, represent the essence of design thinking: empathy and prototyping.

I’ve developed products before, and it usually went something like this: take our knowledge and expertise and design what we feel to be a great solution to the problem. It usually takes a while to get everything together and it isn’t tested much along the way, other than amongst ourselves. The result is usually pretty great. The problem is, nobody uses it. Ourselves included, which is a bright red flag, all too easy to ignore. So it goes back on the shelf until we decide it’s time to revitalize it, and the process repeats again.

This time around things are different. For starters, I’m more thoughtful about the end user and what their experience will be. An entire work stream is now devoted to ethnography, so that we may gain new insights about our clients that help us design tools they’ll want and love to use. It’s not that we didn’t think we needed to understand our clients—it’s that we thought we already did. But this understanding was based on a more communal notion of people, rather than an actual individual person. We’re on a path now to talk to people, to observe them, and to understand them anew.

I’m eager to try things out and even more eager to fail, so that I can learn and iterate and make things better. I know now that the first draft is just that—a draft—and the sooner I get it in the hands of people and find its cracks, the sooner I can fill them in. I no longer worry about getting things right, I worry about getting them done. I can and will adjust them later. I’m free to keep things simple and rough because the most important thing I can do is to just make something. I’m finding that by making ideas tangible early, others are more able to contribute at a stage where they can really make a difference as well.

I’m also more curious than ever about the big picture, and how everything connects. This led to a project that I am particularly passionate about. I’ve long seen connections between ideas that show up in various different courses and programs and it’s no secret that everything we do is fundamentally related. But I felt we had reached a point where the nature of these connections needed to be articulated. By stepping back and taking a systems thinking approach, I’ve drafted a model of how everything interrelates. This model started as post-its on my wall, and I’m confident that if I hadn’t just rolled up my sleeves and gotten started, if I had worried about the “best way” to think about it, I’d still be scratching my head.

Looking back, it’s all so obvious. Of course we need to understand our clients. Of course it’s better to start simple and build organically than try to get everything right in one shot. Of course it’s helpful to keep the big picture in mind, even when you’re down in the weeds. But it’s only obvious if you think about it. And that, for me, is what design thinking is all about: thinking. If you’re really thinking, design will naturally follow.

Easy Meals

A new product developed as part of a Design Research course

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In early 2013 before Blue Apron, Plated, and other similar products were as wildly popular, classmates and I used iterative ethnographic research to develop a new way to help people prepare fresh, healthy food at home. We started out with a concept similar to the meal kit delivery services, but as we spoke to people and collected survey results some interesting trends emerged that led us down a different path. Some of our hey "a-has":

• People are more interested in cooking dinner for their families than for themselves.
• People are more interested in cooking breakfast and lunch for themselves, than dinner
• Fewer people are making lunch from scratch than any other meal
• People mostly don't prepare their own lunches because it's inconvenient and takes too much time

Putting all this together we discovered that if our target is providing meals for families, then dinner is the best meal to provide, just like Blue Apron and Plated. However if we consider individuals as our customers rather than families, then lunch all of a sudden becomes an opportunity.

Our final proposal was for a meal kit that provides everything needed to prepare 3 days worth of lunches in just 30-60 minutes. The use case is someone spending an hour on Sunday making lunches for the week. They enjoy the experience of scratch cooking as well as the benefits of homemade food several days a week, without any of the hassle of cooking and cleaning each night after a long day. We also determined that since most people visit the grocery store each week, it would be preferable for many to pick up these kits at the store rather than have them delivered, given they work during the day and aren't always available to take delivery of perishable goods.

For the presentation, click the image above or click here