TIAA-CREF Homepage and Secure Site Redesign

The challenge was to rejuvenate a retirement company’s homepage and member-only website to align with their overall rebranding strategy. TIAA-CREF wanted to provide their customers with a new digital experience that focused around the concept: Help me feel confident about my retirement.

 

The challenge for TIAA-CREF was to make retirement interesting, understandable and engaging to a 20- and 30-something audience. My team and I conducted an extensive research and discovery phase to come up with a new digital strategy for the website. We audited the content on TIAA-CREF.com, analyzed competitor’s websites, and conducted a variety of interviews among TIAA-CREF members and business stakeholders. By analyzing customer insights, market context and business needs, we understood that TIAA-CREF members were confused about financial planning, found it to be a daunting task, and felt like planning was out of their control. We needed to bring the focus back on the customer, make them feel empowered and help them feel confident about their retirement.

A promotional video of the new TIAA-CREF site can be found here.

My plan of attack

• Discussion: Worked closely with the clients to understand their goals and reasons for this campaign.
• Competitor Analysis: Researched what other brands were doing to target a younger audience through social media and other digital networks.
• User Interviews: Conducted various interviews among members and TIAA-CREF staff to understand the problems and challenges in online financial planning.
• Brainstorming: Investigated ways that would get younger people Tweeting about retirement.
• Sketching: Sketched pages of a small microsite and Twitter visualization page.
• Wireframing: Finalized the designs for the microsite and Twitter visualization page. Worked closely with the visual designer to ensure our design goals were achieved.
• Rapid Prototyping and Testing: Developed fully functional HTML prototypes that we used when conducted multiple rounds of user testing.

Methods

Active discussion, analysis and research, user interview, flows, wireframes, HTML prototyping, user testing

Tools used

Axure, Visio