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Transamerica
Moving legacy products to the modern age
At Transamerica I was part of a team building new post-login apps to replace legacy products.
At Transamerica I was a go-to person for accessibility, and a critical member of the post-login experience team.
Featured Projects
Accessibility
Transamerica is new to accessibility. I was part of a grassroots movement in the company to implement accessibility best practices and create processes so new components and features would be accessible.
I was responsible for performing accessibility audits across all post-login products; this included five in-development websites with hundreds of pages amongst them. I then worked with each site team to create a roadmap to prioritize accessibility fixes.
I also created a DIY guide to enable all UX designers at the company to perform audits both prior to dev handoff, and as a part of the review process once development work was done. This guide included over 20 pages of documentation and several hours of video tutorials to train the team.
Data Visualization
Data visualization is one of the most common challenges at Transamerica. As an accessibility expert, I worked with the design system team to create fully accessible data visualization.
Our new, stunning data visualizations used high contrast colors to help users who were color-blind be able to use the graphs without any loss of information. The graphs and tables were fully interactive and featured easily digestible readouts that were available to both sighted and blind users.
This data visualization project was one of the trickiest projects I worked on at Transamerica. Data visualization is inherently difficult to make accessible, especially when using live data, which made it my favorite project during my time at Transamerica.
Report Center
As part of the post-login UX team, I built a brand new report generator for plan sponsors for them to be able to download reports about their participants.
Our team was able to gather research about what reports were most important to our users, and the challenges they currently had with our legacy system.
The most significant challenges users experienced were:
- Report labels didn’t match their mental model
- Users weren’t sure what category a report fell under, or what to expect out of a report once they ran it. We found that users had very different ways of describing reports than what was present in the existing system.
- System visibility status
- Users would click run report and then see a loading icon. They weren’t sure what they needed to do next, or if they had successfully completed their end of the transaction.
Before we started design work for this product, I did a competitive analysis of popular reporting tools on the market, both within our industry and outside our industry. We found there were common design patterns used for many of the most popular tools, which we were able to incorporate into our designs. This streamlined the user’s flow, and reduced the mental load for users – they no longer needed to remember what other categories were available as they sorted the report options.
Due to services restrictions and the amount of data needed for many report types, we knew there would waiting time between when a plan sponsor requested a report and when they would be able to download that report. Rather than having a loading icon, which was confusing to the users, we ended their user flow with a landing screen that told them to expect an email. They were free to run additional reports at the time, or use any other part of the app. This landing page gave users much greater peace of mind because they now knew there weren’t any additional actions they needed to take.