Case study · Client portal · Australian financial advisory firm · 2024

A Service Wizard for clients who can’t name the service.

Research kept surfacing the same client sentence: “I need financial help, but I don’t know what financial service I need.” So I designed a 7-question guided assessment that translates how clients describe their lives into the services the firm sells, ending in tailored bundles and an advisor-reviewed checkout.

All interfaces below are recreations built for this case study. Branding & details changed; no client IP shown.

Role

Product Designer
Owned end to end

Client

Australian financial
advisory firm

Timeline

May to July 2024

Team

Solo on the Wizard,
within the North Star team

The problem

A financial advisory firm was building a new client portal, and the service catalogue inside it had a language problem. The firm sells things called Asset Allocation Advice and Income Protection Insurance. Clients arrive thinking about a wedding, a first home, a business they want to start. Nobody wakes up wanting income protection insurance. They want to know their family is fine if something happens to them.

Our research kept returning the same sentence, close to word for word, and it is the whole reason this exists.

I need financial help, but I don’t know what financial service I need.

Recurring client quote, client research

Asking a client like that to browse a catalogue is asking them to translate their own life into the firm’s product names, and they will not do it. So the Service Wizard is not there to assess anyone. It is there to translate, in one direction, from how people describe their lives into the services the firm actually sells.

My role & ownership

I was one of the product designers on the portal’s North Star programme, and I led the research synthesis for it. The Wizard was a piece I owned end to end: the question design, the logic that turns answers into a recommendation, the recommendation surface itself, and the checkout pattern at the end. The premise came straight out of the research I had just spent weeks pulling together, so I was designing from something I already understood rather than a brief handed to me.

A note on platform

The Wizard is a desktop-first experience. It is the kind of considered sit-down a client does at a laptop, not something you tap out at a bus stop, so it is designed for that context. The companion onboarding flow was the opposite, designed mobile-first, and it is its own case study.

Entity first, then an honest opt-out

Before any questions, the client confirms which entity the service is for: Personal, Business, or a Trust. This single decision routes everything downstream. A personal recommendation is wasted on a small-business owner, and vice versa.

With the entity locked in, the Wizard offers a genuine choice. Skip, I know what services I want routes straight to the Service Catalogue. Begin, I don’t know what services I want starts the assessment. Both read equal in weight, but the default emphasis sits on Begin. Most clients who land here are in the second group.

Entry · entity selection, then the honest opt-out. Recreation.

Seven questions, and why each is there

Every question is paired with an I’m not sure option, so false-positive answers don’t pollute the recommendation. Questions are written in life-language, not product-language.

01
What are your short-term financial goals?
Multi-select. Surfaces emergency-fund, debt-pay-down, and life-event services. Highest-signal question for the under-40 cohort.
02
What are your long-term financial goals?
Multi-select. Routes to retirement, estate, and education-funding services. Paired with Q01 to disambiguate horizon.
03
Do you have any of the following commitments?
Multi-select. Mortgage, loans, credit cards, investment property, business ownership. Identifies tax-planning and protection services the client wouldn’t name themselves.
04
What’s your annual income range?
Single dropdown, inclusive of superannuation. Calibrates which bundle tier is realistic, so the recommendation isn’t aspirational nonsense.
05
Do you anticipate significant income change in the next 5 years?
Single-select cards. Catches the cohort whose current income doesn’t reflect future capacity: mid-career growth, parental leave, a business sale.
06
What age do you plan to retire?
Sets the time horizon for wealth recommendations. I’m not sure routes to a softer recommendation set instead of forcing a number.
07
What’s your biggest financial concern?
Multi-select with an explicit “I have no concerns.” The final emotional signal; re-weights the top bundle to address what the client loses sleep over.

Q1 · goals in life-language, with the ‘I’m not sure’ escape hatch first. Recreation.

Q5 · single-select cards for the income outlook. Recreation.

Why seven

Seven is not a number I optimised to. It is the number the output needed. The Wizard has to place a client into one of four goal groups and one of three service tiers, and every question earns its place by feeding that. Goals, short and long term, map the groups. Commitments, income, and expected income change calibrate the tier, so the recommendation is realistic rather than aspirational. Retirement age sets the horizon, and the final question about their biggest concern re-weights the top result toward whatever they actually lose sleep over. Take any one of those away and the recommendation gets worse in a way you can point to.

I want to be honest about the tension though, because it matters here. The research on this is clear that completion drops with every question you add, and that the worst band for drop-off is roughly six to sixty questions. Seven sits at the very top of what I would consider defensible. It survives because this is not a survey a client fills in for us, it is a tool that only works if it has enough to go on, and below seven the recommendation stops being specific enough to trust. If I could change one thing about the design, it would be to stop asking all seven of everyone, which is the next section.

The output: bundles in human language

While the recommendation is generated, the loading state says what is actually happening: “Generating service recommendations for you…”. Then the surface deliberately swaps the firm’s internal jargon for goal-language at the top level. Managing My Wealth, Preparing for a Rainy Day, Saving for a Home, Consolidating Debt. Technical service names sit one click deeper, so the client sees what they’re working towards and the advisor still sees what they’re delivering.

Within each goal, the client picks a tier. The middle tier sits forward by default. It’s the one most advisors recommend, and the one most clients land on when given the choice.

Recommendations · three tiers per goal, middle tier forward, add-on catalogue below the fold. Recreation.

The checkout: familiar pattern, one critical change

The flow mirrors a pattern clients already know. Add to Service Bag, Review, Confirm. The one deliberate difference is the commitment. No charge happens until an advisor has reviewed and approved the service. Financial advice is not a jumper you buy at midnight, and pretending it is would have broken the trust the whole portal was trying to build. So the checkout gives clients the closure of a familiar pattern, the bag, the review, the confirmation, while keeping a human in the loop before any money moves. You get the ease without the firm having to pretend advice is a self-serve product.

1

Browse or Recommend

Wizard results, or the full Service Catalogue if skipped.

2

Review Details

Service summary, pre-filled billing, required documents.

3

Service Bag

Review everything selected before submitting.

4

Confirm

Billing verified. Card on file. Pay today: $0.

5

Pending Review

Advisor reviews. Client gets confirmation when service starts.

Phase 1, then Phase 2

Phase 1 ships as an Expression of Interest flow. Same shape as a checkout, but the submission queues for advisor review before any charge. Phase 2, on the roadmap, opens self-service purchase for services that don’t require advisor input. The flow was designed so Phase 2 is a downstream toggle, not a rebuild.

What came of it

The Wizard was one of four prototype explorations that went to executives and the board, as part of the strategy for whether to build a new portal or extend the existing one. Its job in that deck was to make an abstract argument concrete. It is one thing to say clients cannot navigate a catalogue of financial jargon, and another to show a working flow that takes someone from “I don’t know what I need” to a short list of services described in their own language.

Same honesty as the rest of this. There is no conversion number here, because the portal was a strategy and design engagement rather than a shipped product. What the Wizard did was turn a hard idea into something a room of decision-makers could actually see and react to. For a piece of work whose point was to change how the firm thinks about selling services, that was the job.

What didn’t work

The honest limitation is that I never watched a single client use this. The North Star work was a strategy and design engagement that produced direction and prototypes for a decision, not a shipped product, so the Wizard was designed carefully and validated by nobody. For a flow whose entire value is the quality of one recommendation, that is the thing I most wish had gone differently. Everything I believe about it is a well-reasoned bet, not a tested fact, and I would say that in the room.

Testing would almost certainly have caught the flaw I can already see in it. Every client answers all seven questions, whether they are relevant or not. Someone who has just told me they are starting a business is still asked what age they plan to retire. Given what the research says about every extra question costing completions, a flow that cannot skip its own irrelevant questions is leaving completions on the table by design. The right version is adaptive: each answer decides which question is worth asking next, so nobody is walked through steps that do not apply to them. I designed the static version because it was what the prototype needed to demonstrate the idea. The tested version would have had to be smarter.

Reflection

The most useful skill on this was not visual design. It was translation. Not the wizard’s translation of clients into services, though that was the point of it, but my own, between a firm that describes what it does in product and compliance language and a client base that describes its life in weddings and houses and worry. Most of the good decisions here came from refusing to let the firm’s language win by default, because the client never speaks it.

The other thing I take from it is smaller and more personal. I am confident designing a flow like this and I can defend every question in it. I am less practised at insisting the thing gets tested before I call it finished, and this is a flow that really needed it. That is the gap I would most like to close next.