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Morningstar

Future Me

  • Morningstar

  • Challenge

    Make financial wellness, daily budgeting, and retirement planning feel like issues that are real enough and urgent enough to inspire user action.

  • Solution

    Use easy-to-answer questions to help people imagine their futures, starting with the easier-to-picture immediate future, and moving out from there.

  • Results

    A campaign that gets users thinking about, and acting upon, their financial futures through questions that are quick, relevant, and even a bit fun.

How do you inspire people to take control of their financial wellness and start planning for retirement? How do you advise people in a way that’s interesting and in a way that doesn’t make them feel overwhelmed? These were the questions we asked when financial company Morningstar challenged us to create a joint-marketing campaign with their HelloWallet division that would propel users to engage with the daily financial planning and retirement services available via Morningstar through users’ employers.

Creative Concept

A Fresh Approach

We decided to change things up by developing questions that were human, witty, and easy to answer. We created an experience that doesn’t make people feel like they’re failing a test, nor does it rely on fear as a method to produce action. For a small, fast project like this, the team worked closely together from day one. The designer, front-end developer, and copywriter were able to stay in sync to build a creative solution that stayed on schedule.

Content Strategy

It's Personal

At the same time, we did need things to get a little personal. We wanted to know more than what people "did" with their money — we wanted to know why they were doing what they did. This information would allow us to better understand a user’s relationship with money and recommend products geared toward his or her financial goals.

Response Logic

Making Data Relatable

The information you typically enter into a financial calculator — your savings account balance, salary, and retirement contributions — are relatively one-dimensional data points; they don’t create a real-life picture of your financial health. Our relatable, conversational approach made it possible to collect richer, more nuanced user data, which then allowed us to make product recommendations that were more accurate and, therefore, more helpful to our users. 

Summary

The interactive survey we designed and built approached financial planning without being overwhelming or overly technical. Morningstar’s financial planning and retirement services became less intimidating and more appealing to users as the survey inspired them to take control of their future.