UX writing often entails translating complex ideas into simpler writing, but just as important is understanding your audience and when not to bring in the complex ideas. For cases like goals, a tool for our Personal Advisor clients to check their financial goal likelihood at a glance, sometimes your clients might not even need or want a full translation.
Challenge:
Previous work on goals was inherited from a team before our team’s time, and we couldn’t make sense of the old explanation of how likelihood of success was calculated. Workplace silos meant it wasn’t easy to figure out how it worked, or who to even ask. Before we could rework the content into something more digestible than the original, we first needed to find out what was accurate to write to begin with.
Process:
After many meetings with business stakeholders and advisors trying to parse through the original content (who is planning to have $1 at age 100?!), we managed to make sense of how exactly likelihood of success is calculated when there are so many variables involved: annual contributions, annual spending in retirement, age of retirement, current amount saved, the list goes on.
In the end, we learned that besides the 10,000 market simulations, there’s also a lot of advisor work going on behind the scenes to account for the individual variables of each client. Based on conversations with their clients, advisors will manually adjust expected retirement ages, annual contributions, annual spending, and more – all behind the scenes, so all the client gets is a nice, neat percentage that they can check at a glance to see if they’re on track.
In our conversations, another thing became clear – clients preferred things this way. Client questions and concerns about likelihood of success were rarely addressed with a deep dive into their finances and Vanguard holdings, and more often with a simple call to their advisors. It makes sense: clients paying for an advisor are probably not clients who want to get into the weeds of their finances.
Outcomes:
In the end, the content was just informative enough to keep clients satisfied that we weren’t just pulling a random magic number out of a hat, but not so informative that they’d be forced to deal with the technical nuances of our calculations. Knowing that clients prefer to discuss their finances with a professional – after all, that’s what they’re paying for – means sometimes, it’s ok to leave things vague.
Benjamin Chen 