Vanguard: Turning retirement data into decisions that feel safe
Our five-person team redesigned part of Vanguard’s Year in Review experience for retired and near-retired users. The project moved from discovery to empathy, synthesis, structure, prototyping, and final pitching.
Our focus was translating qualitative user confusion into a clearer product strategy centered around one idea: helping users understand what their portfolio means not only on paper, but for real life.
The core strategy: translate portfolio data into retirement decisions.
The existing Year in Review experience gave users information about their balances, goals and portfolio activity. The problem was that users did not always know what those numbers meant for their daily lives. Our redesign shifted the experience from reporting data to supporting decisions, especially around the emotional transition from saving for retirement to spending in retirement.
User Confusion
Users struggled with jargon, hidden navigation and unclear sources of account growth.
Product Insight
Retirement users need plain-language signals that connect money to real-life choices.
Final Concept
A retirement paycheck and readiness score that turn portfolio data into action.
The project’s central lesson was that clarity goes beyond being just a writing issue. In financial UX, clarity is the product experience.
The challenge was helping users understand whether they were actually okay.
Vanguard users approaching or entering retirement face a different problem than younger investors. Before retirement, balance growth is the obvious goal. In retirement, watching a balance decline can feel alarming, even when that decline is expected and financially healthy.
Steve Schang, Senior UX Researcher, and Katie Morris, Senior Product Manager, introduced the Vanguard Year in Review challenge and helped frame the product goals for the class.
We used moderated testing to understand how real users interpreted the experience.
Our goal was to redesign the Year in Review experience so users could understand what changed, why it changed and what they could safely do next. To that end, our team conducted listening sessions and usability tests with five Vanguard users or near-users in the 50 to 59 age range. The sessions combined open narrative prompts, free exploration, task-based testing, Likert-scale questions and open-ended reflection.
Participants tested through moderated sessions
Age range for retired and near-retired users
Highest mean score: professional feel
Lowest mean score: anxiety reduction
The results suggested that users generally trusted the design’s professional feel, but still struggled to turn the information into confidence. That gap became the foundation of our redesign.
We mapped users by investing confidence and technology comfort.
We used participant profiles to understand variation across investing experience and technology comfort. This helped the team avoid designing only for expert users or only for novices.
This step mattered because our participants were not one uniform “retirement user.” Some wanted detailed control. Others needed reassurance and plain-language explanation. The final design had to give users confidence without stripping away the ability to explore deeper information.
We built personas around behavior rather than demographics alone.
Our personas translated user testing patterns into design constraints. The set helps show how the team balanced different user needs.
The Cautious Planner needed transparency, reassurance and plain-language explanations before taking action.
The Pragmatic Optimizer wanted benchmarks, observable progress and clear next steps without unnecessary friction.
The Self-Directed Strategist wanted control, customization and enough context to trust the system’s recommendations.
Once the personas were established, the team translated recurring behavioral patterns into focused design questions. Rather than designing around age or technical skill alone, we framed the problem around trust, clarity, reassurance, and decision-making confidence.
These “How Might We” prompts helped the team move from observation into product strategy by identifying where the existing experience created anxiety, friction or uncertainty for users nearing retirement.
The team translated research findings into “How Might We” questions around anxiety reduction, financial literacy, clarity, reassurance and user engagement.
Users lacked interpretation, not information.
Financial jargon caused disengagement
Terms like “target asset mix,” “personalized glide path” and “all-index investment setting” made some users stop engaging with the content.
Growth sources were unclear
Users struggled to tell whether balance changes came from their own contributions, market performance or another source.
Navigation blocked progress
The “Continue” button was the only asset below the fold on each page, leaving some users unsure how to move forward.
We reframed the initial prototype weaknesses into three design requirements: clarify the “on track” signal, use more human financial language, and separate growth from contributions.
We reorganized the experience around what users needed to understand, evaluate and do.
After testing, the team moved into information architecture and user-flow work. The key decision was to make the Year in Review feel more guided without trapping users in a rigid sequence. We wanted users to see the most important answers first, then branch into detail only when they needed it.
Our team used collaborative card sorting to evaluate how Year in Review content should be grouped, sequenced and prioritized for retired and near-retired users.
The card-sorting process revealed that users were struggling because the experience did not clearly communicate sequence, hierarchy or decision priority. That insight pushed the team toward a more guided interaction model: surface the most important retirement signals first, reduce restart-heavy navigation patterns and create clearer pathways into deeper information only when users wanted it.
The experience shifts from a fragmented, restart-heavy flow (Flow 1) to a more structured, guided system (Flow 2) with clearer entry points, stronger continuity and fewer dead ends.
The final concept used retirement information to build a monthly decision system.
The Retirement Paycheck card translates an abstract portfolio balance into an estimated monthly spending number. The Retirement Readiness card gives users a clear “on track” signal, then explains the drivers behind that status.
Retirement Paycheck
Reframes the portfolio from “how much money do I have?” to “how much can I safely spend each month?”
Readiness Score
Replaces vague retirement status language with a more interpretable signal and supporting drivers.
Plain-language support
Uses tooltips, audio support and simplified explanations to help users understand without feeling talked down to.
My contribution was shaping a clearer product strategy from user research.
What the team accomplished
As a team, we conducted usability testing, synthesized participant needs, developed personas, built user flows, created a Figma prototype and delivered a final pitch around retirement confidence and clarity.
Where I focused
My role centered on synthesis and strategy: identifying the deeper user problem behind the usability findings, helping shape the paycheck and readiness concept and ensuring the final recommendation connected UX decisions to trust, confidence and long-term engagement.
Final presentation day for our Vanguard Architecture Lab pitch. The project required aligning research, synthesis and design across a five-person team under a tight final deadline.
The final work included both a usability testing deck and a pitch deck.
I am including both decks because they show different parts of the process. The usability deck captures research findings and problems; the final pitch deck shows how the team turned those findings into a product concept.
Usability Testing Slide Deck
Documents the moderated testing process, positive findings, friction points and recommendations that shaped the redesign direction.
Open usability deck →Final Pitch Slide Deck
Presents the final retirement paycheck and readiness recommendation, including the mindset shift, solution logic and value for the Vanguard brand.
Open final pitch deck →I can connect UX research to product strategy.
This project required the team to move from raw qualitative feedback to a clear design recommendation. The strongest output was not a cleaner screen, but a reframed product experience built around one purpose: turning retirement data into decision-ready guidance.
That is the kind of product work I want to keep doing: understanding user behavior, isolating the real decision problem and designing systems that make complex information easier to act on.
More strategy and analytics work.
This project reflects how I approach ambiguous user problems: research the experience, identify the deeper constraint and turn insight into a clearer system.