Envisioning a more human-centered approach to design for Schwab

Following a year of successful client service for Schwab, my creative team at Rosetta (later known as PublicisSapient) was invited by the VP of Marketing to envision the future of Schwab.com.

Manifesto

Partnering with our lead strategist and a small team of designers and writers, we started with an inspirational premise, a manifesto that encapsulated how we would want our customers to uniquely feel working with Schwab, a North Star for our vision to aspire towards.

We worked our way into two divergent and strong concepts, pushing each to their limits towards serving prospects with transparency, guidance, and personalization.

Concept 1

Our first concept was all about on-the-spot answers, available anytime and in the right context, explicitly asked or served in anticipation through data and personalization.

People first

We stripped the homepage experience of practically any marketing, making it purely about answering our prospects' most common questions. At the bottom of this and every page would be an interactive ask and answer, interpreting natural language and responding with the most appropriate answer. Answers would be dynamic to the context of both the page its on and the person asking it.

Lean in with engaging interactions

Visually interactive elements would engage prospects to lean in to the experience rather than sit back and scroll. Contextual questions would be available down the side of every page to provide answers with hyper-precise context.

Make it personal and authentic with real people

Reveal the people behind the company, inviting prospects to find a local branch and advisor to ask questions in person. Forego formality to reveal the advisor as a regular and approachable person.

Concept 2

A more radical idea, we wanted to see what it would be like if Schwab took a step back to let the customers do the talking truly seeing the client experience through real clients' eyes.

Let our customers do the talking

The experience would begin with prospects' most common questions answered by a panel of customers. Each person would answer the same question, but their answer would be unique to their situation. Our prospect would be invited to discover which people most resonated with their situation, as these same clients would be available to answer questions throughout the experience.

Infuse the experience with customer context

The contextual questions from the first concept are presented here as a flyout of our clients' avatars. Their answers would come in the form of videos offering deeper insight and engagement with the answer.

Partner the customer with advisor

Radical transparency would come in the form of customers talking about and championing their advisors. While frought with legal challenges along with much of this concept, a purposeful overreach intended to spark thought experiments and inspire other possibilities.

Make mobile moments matter

Applicable to both concepts, the mobile experience would focus on answering questions with simplicity and immediacy, quickly guiding users to the right answer or destination.

Outcome

Our client was so enamored and excited by our vision work that she invited us to present to the CMO of Schwab ourselves. We delivered a successful presentation to the CMO that would lead to a multi-year relationship of service to execute on the vision.