Fidelity Investments - MyMoney / Cinch
The Digital Platform Team at Fidelity Investments devised an ingenious way to begin a brand relationship with millenials—a segment they had previously overlooked. Through a free online budgeting tool called “Simplify” they could track their inflows and outflows and invest the money they had left over at the end of the month through Fidelity.
We looked at products such as Mint, HelloWallet, LearnVest, Betterment, Simple, Personal Capitol, Yodlee MoneyCenter, Money Desktop and CashEdge, and strategized that we could either take a PFM (Personal Financial Management) provider’s widget and tweak if for our purposes, or use their APIs to create our own experience.
So as a proof of concept, they built a microsite called My Money in Drupal, one of many free open source web content management systems. This would showcase and host the SaaS application, now rebranded “Cinch” which would be built on the company’s application platform, based on the SDL Tridion framework.
My challenge was to analyze and “reverse engineer” this site and it’s feature application to develop the UX artifacts needed by the development team located remotely in India. After mapping the information architecture and user journeys (both of which did not already exist as UX artifacts), I worked closely with the governance pillar to craft the UI based on the corporate VDL and pattern library.
However, the product owners had become attached to the POC they had created, and found it difficult to transition to the “real UI affordances” that were part of Fidelity UXD’s official VDL and pattern library. My challenge had now become helping product owners to understand the value of design systems and the need to establish a re-use case for net-new patterns. And this would become one of my greatest goals over the next five years.
Fidelity UX was very UI-oriented, still using the long-discontinued Adobe FireWorks (previously a MacroMedia product) for “redlines” (detailed, pixel-level UI specifications) and light prototyping. They were gradually transitioning to AxureRP with which I had considerable experience. But this was a great opportunity to revisit an old favorite, and collaborate closely with the UI team.
Much of the remaining work entailed working closely with the development team, sitting in on early morning scrum meetings and deconstructing HTML and CSS to identify and map the Tridion components that would constitute the final product. My takeaway was a deeper understanding of the value of Agile/UX integration with a UX practice.
Once I had mapped the patterns from the Drupal POC site to the available components in the VDL/Pattern Library, we could better understand the scope of what lie ahead. We weighed the pros and cons of three scenarios; keeping the site in Drupal, which would be difficult to maintain but preserve the original design intent, migrating to an 80% reuse case which would allow some flexibility, or rethinking the site entirely using only the available pattern library components built in Tridion. Ultimately we went with the 80% reuse case which yielded this new design…
This shifted the development of the UX artifacts to a more agile scenario. I broke the wireframe/redlines down into smaller units, organizing them on a feature-component level, where they were treated like black boxes within their parent page-components. Given the bandwidth limitations of the development team, this enabled them to prioritize the components in their backlog and more easily integrate them with their other work.
Ultimately the component mapping work done on this project lead to a larger project of adapting each component for responsive behavior. By collaborating with the Tridion team, we were able to pull down two partial component inventories from two different data tables in .csv format, and combine them in Excel to arrive at more complete picture. We were then able to see which components added the most value in RWD migration, shaping the product backlog and informing the production roadmap.
