Vanguard participant experience

The problem

The experience made a hard job harder.

Retirement investing is hard enough on its own. The old participant experience made it harder. It was cluttered and dated, and it was organized around Vanguard's product structure instead of the decisions a saver actually has to make.

The original participant experience.

Approach

We mapped journeys instead of personas.

A persona tells you who someone is. What mattered here was where they were in their retirement timeline. Six months of research with 50 participants gave us four journeys, and those four became the spine of the roadmap.

What I owned

Sequencing and trade-offs.

• Set the sequence across six surfaces: dashboard, increase contribution, compare contribution, the 401(k) withdrawal flow, error messaging and alerts, and information architecture.
• Held API parity as a hard constraint. The redesign had to ship against Vanguard's existing services, so every design call was also a feasibility call.
• Ran the trade-offs between what design wanted, what engineering could ship, and what the client would accept, across a 100-person program.
• Set the measure we would be judged on: NPS across the redesigned journeys, not surface-level engagement.

The bet

What the dashboard had to do.

The dashboard had one job: show someone where they actually stand. On top of that we added nudges, driven by the same APIs, that recommended a next step. The one that moved the needle most was also the simplest, telling someone they were not yet capturing their full employer match.

Nudges recommending the next useful action.

The redesigned dashboard.

One participant in usability testing said it better than our copy did: "it's fun… it's like a game."

Outcome

What changed.

NPS rose 23% across the redesigned journeys, serving more than 5 million retirement investors.

The redesigned experience.