Storyboarding concepts for Estate Planning new products & services (July 2020)
Problem
Opportunities to meaningfully re-imagine an existing estate planning solution abound as LegalZoom’s current offering can fall short of what customers expect during a journey that requires high confidence, tough conversations with loved ones, and thinking about a future they’re not a part of.
Summary
We interviewed customers, abandoners, and potential customers to understand their experiences with Estate Planning and surface areas of opportunity for product and service innovation. We developed and applied research insights to conceptualize new product and service ideas with storyboards. Concepts were tested with users that were starting to navigate the estate planning world to evaluate and validate our product direction before investing development resources.
Key Roles
Mariangela Marin (Research, synthesis, ideation, prototyping)
Meg McLaughlin (Research & synthesis)
Maryanne Lee (Synthesis & insight development)
Dan Harris (High fidelity screen concepts)
Process
Process from research to concept development. (April 2020)
Understanding the current state
The existing family of estate planning products had several usability and functionality issues that became prioritized to be addressed immediately by the product design team. This prioritization allowed the experience strategy team to focus on the broader estate planning service ecosystem to understand the space we had to work to identify opportunities for product and service innovation. We started by auditing the end-to-end product experience to understand the touch-points, actors, and actions that play a part in the estate planning experience to determine what works and what needs to improve. We mapped out these elements and highlighted known customer and business pain-points.
If you’d like to learn how we used these research findings to drive stakeholder and cross-functional alignment, please go here.
Aligning business and research objectives
To identify the questions that we wanted to answer through user interviews, we gathered input from stakeholders working within the estate planning product and service space. We identified the following research objectives:
Research Objectives
- What represents a blocker/motivation to put a Will in place?
- What are the main barriers to do Estate Planning with LegalZoom?
- What types of support does a user expect to have access to throughout their experience with estate planning?
- What additional product and service opportunities should LegalZoom explore to provide a best in class estate planning solution?
Based on the questions that we wanted to answer with our research, we recruited people that had created a will or testament with LegalZoom to understand their experience before, during, and after creating their will with our service. We also spent some time interviewing people that were planning on getting or revising a will in the following six months.
We talked to a total of 19 participants with different levels of expertise with estate planning during generative and evaluative research (April - July 2020)
Estate Planning stories
We spoke to a broad group of people to understand the commonalities and differences that drove them to start planning for their legacy, understand their assumptions, expectations, and challenges.
Meet Carla:
Carla is a 50-year-old naturalized American citizen native from New Zealand currently working as a Marketing Director in Washington, DC. She’s been married for almost 18 years with her husband Bob, with whom she has two teenage children, two dogs, and one cat. Carla doesn’t recall exactly when she learned about Estate Planning, she’s not an expert on the subject, but she’s always known how critical they are. By making sure she explains in writing how she wants her remains to be handled, name beneficiaries for her assets, and identify the people that she wants to her legacy, she knows she will have peace of mind.
But despite having an accurate idea about how vital Estate Planning is and the peace of mind it would offer in return once it's done, Carla is behind in this process:
Carla is one of 18 people we talked to about Estate Planning that helped us shed light on the pain points, challenges and perceptions people have about planning what's going to happen with your legacy after you're gone.
In order to communicate critical touch-points that our prospects and customers interact with as they navigate estate planning, we mapped each of our research participant's journeys. We synthesized them into a baseline end-to-end experience journey to visualize the overarching emotional path and surface the common key moments that can make or break a customer's experience before, during and after they use LegalZoom's service.
Estate Planning Customer Journey Map with Participant Quotes, Research Insights & Key Moments (October 2020)
Conceptualizing new experiences through insight combination
After sharing our research findings with our cross-functional team members, we facilitated an ideation session with members of the product team. In order to make sure we did the most with the time we had available, we asked participants to vote on the insights they wanted to focus on ideating further upon.
Using a combination of the product ideas participants brought to the session as a provocation, and the voted research insights as a constraint, we were able to come up with +40 ideas that we then categorized in terms of value to the customer and value to the business. The product manager and the segment owner helped us further prioritize the ideas we should focus on developing for the following 6 months - 1 year. With this, we were ready to jump into prototyping.
Using insight combination during ideation, we came up with more than 40 ideas that we later prioritized in terms of value to the business and value to the customer.
Storyboarding Product & Service Concepts
From our prioritization process, we identified the near and long term opportunity areas that we could turn into product features and scenarios for concept development.
To make storyboards that we could test with prospects to validate product direction, we created four distinct scenarios inspired by research insights as well as key themes, pain points and needs we heard from our research participants. We started by crafting different scenarios that touched on: learning about estate planning, completing documents, proactively revising a document, and educating stakeholders about next steps involving the testator’s estate plan.
Estate Planning product and service concept storyboards (April 2020)
Testing our concepts
With testing we wanted to do the following:
Based on qualitative feedback from concept testing, we will surface the emotional value required in the EP experience and start the task of designing specific capabilities to prototype in the future solution.
In order to be successful, our concepts must:
- Allow potential customers to feel confident with the process of creating a will
- Empower potential customers to learn about the process of creating a will and educate their respective representatives and stakeholders.
We recruited eight potential customers with different levels of expertise with estate planning to test the four concepts we developed.
A few key quotes of participant feedback for each one of our concept tests. (June 2020)
High level summary of Estate Planning Concept Test findings (July 2020)
Findings and next steps
After analyzing our concept test findings, we came up with recommendations we should pursue through implementation at a screen, flow and system level. This activity allowed us to understand which were the areas in a user's journey that were more valuable from a potential user perspective, and understand at a high level the effort and resources that it would take to implement these recommendations.
EP product near term recommendations at the screen, flow and system level.
Overall, getting feedback from users on our concepts was a valuable resource that gave us insights on several areas of the business and product development and were beneficial for teams outside of our segment.
1. There's an opportunity to continue pursuing the idea of providing legal help through accessible resources but not necessarily through immediate access to legal help. In short, we need to keep focusing on:
a. Keeping customers accountable to complete and keep their will up to date
b. Personalizing the attorney experience, but prioritize attorney tips and examples.
c. Educating all stakeholders and representatives of a will
d. Design customer experience integrations with partner or alternative solutions to help customers notarize their will.
2. Hearing feedback as well as experiences from people navigating or starting to navigate the estate planning world allowed us to focus on:
- Uncovering two new insights based on gaps we identified before testing and confirmed through testing:
1. Emphasizing acknowledgement of the moment of your legal documents
2. Making a more robust and flexible learning experience especially at the beginning of a user's journey to empower them to feel confident during their search for the right document.
2. Testing these four concepts helped us reinforce a consistent path of user behavior to develop design principles that can help us refine future product and service direction and socialize across functions.
Lessons I learned
1. Testing high level ideas through storyboarding is a great method to understand the effectiveness of a combination of channels and interactions through the eyes of a potential audience. It also helped further validate the veracity of the scenarios we developed as a team by hearing and observing how potential users relate, or don't relate to our hypothetical characters.
2. Because of business constraints, the research we conducted was meant to be generative, but we realized as we were synthesizing our first study that there is a lot of foundational research still to be unraveled to understand the human behavior behind planning for death and identify opportunities to design behavioral change.
4. As a complementary part of the research, interviewing attorneys providing Estate Planning services is an important next step to consider in order to validate and further shed light on the opportunities for product/service improvements and innovation.
