Sun life
Sun Life is a Canadian financial services company known primarily for its life insurance products and asset management services.
On the Sun Life website, clients can assign beneficiaries for their accounts. Beneficiaries are the people or institutions that will receive the money in the account when the client passes away. Sun Life wants to help its clients make educated choices regarding future financial planning.
Clients can assign a beneficiary as irrevocable, meaning another person can't contest the money given to the beneficiary. For example, your parent can't challenge the money you want to give to your best friend.
But to withdraw money or make changes to your account's beneficiaries, you'll need your best friend's written consent. And if your best friend is a minor, you must either wait until they're an adult or get a court order.
Currently, clients are naming irrevocable beneficiaries without understanding the gravity of this decision. Sun Life wants its clients to carefully consider who they choose as irrevocable beneficiaries.
How might we educate clients on the impact of assigning an irrevocable beneficiary?
Users can assign a beneficiary as irrevocable by clicking the checkbox under Revocable Status and then clicking Yes in the confirmation modal (see images below).
The content in the confirmation modal is clumped together, and a user could easily miss the paragraph related to minors. We needed to simplify the content and use language that was easy for our clients to understand.
Working with stakeholders in the Legal and Compliance departments, we created two simply-worded paragraphs to explain the potential ramifications of assigning an irrevocable beneficiary. The second paragraph details the possible vexation of designating a minor as an irrevocable beneficiary.
We added spacing between paragraphs to separate them and incorporated bullet points to emphasize information quickly and effectively so the user will not feel overwhelmed.
Upon content testing, we found that users who read the whole content understood the impact, but some were still not reviewing all the details.
How might we get the user to stop and consider who they assign as an irrevocable beneficiary?
Sun Life's design pattern always has the primary (yellow) button on the bottom right. As this solution breaks the design pattern, we rejected this idea.
We considered having No as the primary button and Yes as the secondary button. Doing this may reduce the chance of a user clicking Yes, but it doesn't solve getting the user to stop and review the content, so we dropped this idea too.
Inspired by websites that ask their users to type in 'Delete' and then click on the button Delete to delete a file, we experimented with asking users to type in 'Yes' and then click on the button, Yes to assign an irrevocable beneficiary.
This design tested well with all 7 users. Even though this design slowed them down in the process, it forced them to stop, read the content, and comprehend the consequences of assigning an irrevocable beneficiary.
We didn't switch the order of the buttons or the content but added a step where the user can't progress without typing in 'Yes'. Albeit inconvenient, testing showed that users stopped to review the content and appreciated the design friction given the gravity of an irrevocable beneficiary.
After multiple rounds of review, Operations, Risk, Legal, and Compliance departments approved the new designs and content. This solution was well received because it not only educated our clients on the impact of assigning an irrevocable beneficiary, but we did our due diligence to ensure they read and understood the consequences of their decision before making it.
