January 2026 - Present
Inspira Financial | Sr. UX Content Designer
I am the senior UX writer supporting the Retirement and Wealth platform. I own the onboarding and trading experiences. As the senior writer, I also play a part in mentoring our junior writer.
Summary
One of the biggest challenges faced with the onboarding experience is that users generally don’t know who Inspira Financial is. They receive a letter in the mail informing them that their previous employer has rolled over their 401k to Inspira with steps on how to “claim their money”. The problem is that most users claim their money, then immediately withdraw it from their Inspira account.
This presents an interesting challenge, as it’s important to build trust while also maintaining encouraging messaging. We want to make the account claim process as easy as possible, while encouraging users to keep their funds in their Inspira account to invest.
Impact
Digging Deeper: “Smart Target”
The idea behind “Smart Target” was that we wanted to give account holders a quick and easy way to invest in a target date fund from the homepage. An earlier version of Smart Target looked like an ad on the homepage, and account holders generally ignored it.
The other challenge is that the average user isn’t an investment whiz, and we needed to have content that was supportive and informative in tone.
To achieve this goal, we replaced the old version of the Smart Target “ad” with a more informative banner.
The idea behind this new approach accomplished two goals. We inform the account holders how much cash they have available and uninvested, and we do a little bit of legwork explaining the benefits of investing in a target date fund.
This is also a completely optional feature, and it was important that users didn’t feel forced to invest if they weren’t ready.
Once they’re ready to invest, we take them into the investment flow, taking them step-by-step in investing in a target date fund, starting with an account selection and confirming the target date fund they want to invest in.
Next, the account holder has to decide how much of their available cash they want to invest:
Users then have to review and acknowledge legal disclaimers and confirm their order:
Once they place an order, we display a confirmation modal:
Results & lessons learned
Since release, utilization of Smart Target has tripled in just two months. Users find the redesign more streamlined and easier to understand.
The success of the release is a direct result of the strong collaboration between design, product, and development.
That’s not to say this project was without its challenges. The content went through many revisions, as the result of stakeholder feedback and legal/compliance reviews. Part of the challenge was that Inspira cannot be viewed as a financial advisor, and I needed to make sure my copy was still helpful and supportive.
This project was a great exercise in advocating for the user while ensuring the language I used was compliant.