Planswell

Planswell is a Toronto-based startup delivering free financial plans in about three minutes through a robo-advisor platform. With Planswell, anyone can create free financial plans online and receive personalized advice from financial planning professionals to help them grow their wealth, reduce debt, and maintain the best standard of living throughout their life.

I was responsible for the overall design direction, creating an integrated brand and design system that works holistically through all the company, redesigning all the client-facing and internal web applications, being an integral part of the product development weekly cycle, working alongside the development and operations team to ensure the best user experience while creating an engaging and fun experience.

Planswell was founded in 2015 and by the end of 2019 they were an already established startup with 57 employees and a proven business model. But an incident made the company shut down after investors pulled an important finance round. By the mid of 2020, the founders decided to rebuild the company, buying back their robo-advisor software previously created, and started hiring another team. I was invited to join the company as an early contributor to work 100% remote alongside the founding team.

Due to confidentiality reasons I cannot disclose certain information regarding the UX strategy and the product but I'm available for a call if you need clarifications about how was my engagement with the company and methods I used within the product and operational team. Below is some design thinking behind the product.

I designed a landing page to onboard advisors to the platform. We offer them seven days trial of the product, where they embark on a journey of sales workshops to become great at attracting new clients and expanding their financial advice knowledge. During the trial, we provide leads to the advisors, where they practice their sales and rapid rapport skills.

During the discovery phase, users answer a preliminary questionnaire where the software gathers all the data required to build a plan. We tried to make the user experience as intuitive and quick as possible ( less than 3 minutes ) because each unnecessary step could prompt users to give up the journey and not have their phone and email submitted.

After the user goes through the process of filling out his questionnaire, we deliver a comprehensive financial plan and encourage them to book a call with an advisor, to have a better analysis of the plan. We deliver the plan through cards that contain all the tips and information the user needs to take the necessary steps in securing his retirement.

During the user journey, we had to encourage people to book a call after their plan was delivered. The way we did this was by showing special cards trying to show to users that they can have a much better plan with better returns tailored by an advisor.

Additionally to the user's facing platform, I've also designed the entire advisor and admin internal tools, where our staff can assign leads to advisors, and advisors can manage their leads and client's plans.

The company maintains an in-house illustrator that provides all the assets for the product and marketing team to create beautiful designs. The visual language is all based on illustrations that propose to convey a funny approach to a serious topic that is savings, retirement, and people's money. We assign different products to each character within the product's environment.

Additionally in designing the user experience for the products, I also designed different proposals to be used on branding and collaterals.

Planswell entered the US market in October of 2020 with US revenue quickly surpassing business in Canada, the company's home base. To date, over 1000 advisors in North America have partnered with Planswell from virtually every major financial institution— in addition to solo, independent firms—to help consumers action their financial plans. Planswell has delivered over 300,000 free financial plans to households located in every US state and Canadian province.

Tamara Antonijevic, Michael Oghene, Michael Chu, Sam Unterman, Shaun Esau, Trevor Oseen, Craig Savolainen, Dean Khialani, Anthony Gomez, Amee Reodica, Abdullah Hussain