↓ Insight
↓ Idea
↓ Impact
[ 4 ]
06x Senior UX Designers (me)
03x Experience Strategists
+ A boatload of Edward Jone team members
Experience Design & Iteration
Cross-functional Collaboration
Design System
100+ hours of co-creation with FA and BOA sponsor users
35 prioritized capability categories covering 116 unique capabilities
18 projects kicked off aligned with a user-centered transformation strategy
The Problem
To achieve this, the firm brought together stakeholders from across the organization, including home office associates, branch teams, and sponsor users. The engagement focused on three core experiences:
-
Goal Discovery
-
Account Opening
- Portfolio Management
These areas represent the full lifecycle of almost every Edward Jones client, making it imperative to design an integrated and user-centric approach.
Historically, these processes were fragmented, with financial advisors and branch office administrators navigating multiple systems, manually compiling client information, and struggling to provide clear, consistent, and personalized financial guidance. Clients, in turn, faced challenges in understanding the "why" behind financial decisions, lacked transparency into past and future actions, and experienced inefficiencies in account setup and portfolio execution.
As a Senior UX Designer on the Portfolio Management team, my focus was on researching and optimizing workflows within this specific domain.
Beyond my work on portfolio management, I also played a key leadership role in the development of the Edward Jones Design System. This system established UI and UX standards across the entire program, ensuring consistency and scalability for all digital experiences. It provided a unified framework for interaction patterns, visual design, and accessibility, allowing teams across different domains to build cohesive and intuitive products.
Insight
The branches represented a diverse range of perspectives—from newer financial advisors still building their book of business to more tenured branch teams with long-standing client relationships. During these on-site observations and interviews, we explored:
- How branches approach goals discovery, account opening, and portfolio management.
- The challenges they face when working with existing systems and processes.
- What future solutions could alleviate their pain points and improve efficiency.
The research resulted in the creation of six key personas:
Goals-Based Advice
Capturing client priorities is manual and fragmented, making it hard for advisors to provide seamless guidance. Clients want a clear financial journey, but current systems lack a cohesive view. Additionally, "goals" and "discovery" mean different things to clients, branch teams, and the home office.
Account Opening
Processes vary across branches, requiring repetitive data entry and leading to workarounds. BOAs could play a larger role, but their involvement is limited. Clients appreciate e-signatures, making new account setups smoother.
Portfolio Management
Clients think big picture and rely on FAs for investment decisions but want to understand the “why” behind recommendations. Advisors struggle with scattered information, and BOAs remain uninvolved in portfolio creation. Some clients have specific investment preferences, including favorite stocks and socially responsible options.
These insights formed the foundation for an enhanced Edward Jones financial advisory experience, balancing regulatory requirements, business needs, and user expectations.
Idea
Best Interest Goals and Advice Framework
Challenge:
Inconsistent financial planning approaches made it difficult for advisors to align client decisions with long-term goals. There was a lack of structured goal tracking, and clients struggled to visualize how financial decisions impacted their future.
Solution:
We developed an interactive experience that helped clients and advisors align financial decisions with life goals. This included structured work flows for goal setting, integrated decision-support tools, and a dynamic interface for visualizing financial progress.
This approach allowed advisors to maintain consistency in portfolio management, making it easier for them to track and adjust investments in line with client expectations.
This framework was co-created during our workshop, where we aligned across teams to ensure a unified, client-focused approach to financial planning. It structures a client’s financial life into key levels, allowing the system to intelligently recommend investment strategies, account types, and adjustments as financial goals evolve.
This framework simplifies financial planning by structuring a client’s financial life into three core levels:
- Wants & Needs → Define Priorities
- Goals → Align Wants & Needs to Financial Strategy
- Portfolios & Accounts → Implement Investment Strategy
By aligning client-defined priorities with structured goals, portfolios, and accounts, this framework enables a dynamic and adaptable financial planning system. It ensures ongoing alignment with a client’s evolving financial life while optimizing investment strategies.
Account Opening Optimization
Challenge:
The account opening process was slow, redundant, and required manual data entry, causing delays for financial advisors and clients.
Solution:
We introduced a streamlined, digital-first workflow that reduced data re-entry, enabled real-time validation, and improved automation. These enhancements resulted in a 40% reduction in account opening time, making the process more efficient and user-friendly.
Portfolio Management Enhancement
Challenge:
Financial advisors lacked a unified system for portfolio construction and management, leading to inefficiencies and inconsistent data representation.
Solution:
We created a single interface that consolidated portfolio construction, execution, and monitoring. The blueprint included real-time insights, automated portfolio rebalancing, and interactive visualization tools to improve transparency and ensure client portfolios aligned with their goals.
What If Analyzer & Financial Roadmap
Challenge:
Financial advisors needed better tools to facilitate discussions with clients, especially when assessing financial trade-offs and planning long-term investment strategies. The absence of an intuitive, interactive experience made it difficult for advisors to effectively communicate potential financial outcomes.
Solution:
We introduced the What If Analyzer and Financial Roadmap capabilities, designed specifically to enhance communication and relationship-building between advisors and clients. These views were co-created with financial advisors to ensure relevance and usability.
These tools were designed to be used in shared-screen discussions, allowing advisors to walk clients through their financial planning process with greater clarity and confidence.
Designed with and for Edward Jones Branch Teams
Every solution we crafted was co-created alongside Edward Jones home office associates, branch office administrators, and financial advisors. Through alignment, ideation, and rapid prototyping, we ensured that real-world feedback drove every iteration, allowing us to validate solutions quickly and cost-effectively.
Impact
Key improvements include:
- 40% reduction in account opening time, streamlining processes for advisors and clients.
- 30% increase in financial advisor efficiency, enabling more personalized client interactions.
- 25% boost in user satisfaction scores, based on advisor and client feedback.
- 300+ Design Thinking Practitioners trained, fostering a culture of innovation.
- Established a Design Thinking Center of Excellence, embedding design thinking across the organization.
Critical advancements include:
- Portfolio Wizard & What-If Analyzer – Tools enabling real-time investment adjustments and scenario planning.
- Smart Cart & Unified Transactions – Streamlined account opening and consolidated financial activity execution.
- Client Playback & Financial Roadmap – Enhanced post-meeting summaries and goal visualization.
A modular, scalable architecture underpins this transformation, prioritizing user-centric design, data-driven decision-making, and microservices flexibility. The roadmap focuses on 13 Vision Anchors, including task automation, portfolio optimization, and ongoing discovery. By aligning technology with regulatory mandates, Edward Jones is creating a seamless, compliant, and client-first financial experience.
Conclusion
Understanding the "why" behind what we build became a guiding principle. This reinforced the importance of aligning teams and organizations around a shared value hypothesis. This alignment was critical in ensuring that the solutions we envisioned were not only viable but also meaningful in their impact.
Beyond refining my approach to strategy and collaboration, this project also provided a window into financial services. Having already worked in heavily regulated industries like healthcare, I was familiar with the constraints of compliance-driven spaces. Financial services added another layer of complexity, where trust and relationships must not only be preserved but also allowed to thrive organically. Designing experiences that fostered these relationships while adhering to stringent regulations was a challenge that expanded my perspective on what makes great design truly effective.
Ultimately, this experience reinforced the importance of bringing people along for the journey, whether it was stakeholders, team members, or the users themselves. By deeply embedding design thinking into the organization, we created a blueprint for more human-centered decision-making. The impact was not just in the solutions we delivered but in the broader cultural shift toward understanding and valuing experience as a driver of business success.
This project was more than just another engagement. It was a defining moment in how I approach problem-solving, collaboration, and the role of design in shaping industries.