ALERUS FINANCIAL

Created a personalized hub to track and improve financial health

PROJECT GOAL

Bring education and financial awareness to Alerus customers

Following our successful launch of the Alerus Financial website, My Alerus was created as a supplement to get personalized support from an Alerus advisor and track how customer financial health measures up.

  • Calculate a financial wellness score with measurement across five key workout areas.

  • Provide up-to-date financial data from all financial accounts.

  • Create a personalized budget to monitor expenses and set goals.

Agency: Flint Group

Client: Alerus Financial

My role: UX strategy, UI design

Challenges

Jumping in mid-project
The client tried working directly with the external development team to create the My Alerus experience but were not happy with the results. They brought us in to help guide user experience and design on two layouts hoping that would be enough to get the project on track.

As our team began working with Alerus, we were recruited to UX and design the entire project.

Complex use cases to be considered:

  • Creating templates that suited Alerus managed and self-managed investment accounts.

  • Working with information from data aggregation tools such as Yodlee.

Our approach

Our team worked closely with the Alerus team to provide our best-case scenario based on existing functionality as well as recommendations for improvements.

Since we were working with an existing design systems, we opted to not create traditional wireframes and present high-fidelity prototypes instead. Staying efficient and on budget was essential since Alerus invested in a unsuccessful first attempt.

Issues that were addressed:

  • The use of dark blue was used for headers and buttons making it difficult to quickly determine their purpose.

  • Ambiguous icons were used in the header.

  • Some text did not meet ADA requirements for color contrast.

  • Templates were not conducive for the greatest amount of links and text possible.

  • The ability to edit account information was not placed in an intuitive spot.

My Alerus prior to Flint involvement.

Retirement planning workout

A retirement budgeting questionnaire based on factors such as if the individual has a current Alerus retirement account, manually added accounts, pension and Social Security.

RESULT

The initial sales target was surpassed by 1,000 enrollments, achieving over 18,500 enrollments for the new product.