Sal Criscione | Household

At a Glance

Project Name: “Household Tool: Unified Client Management”

Challenge	Financial advisors lacked a standardized method to group related clients into "households." This forced manual workarounds and resulted in fragmented data, making it impossible to track accurate aggregate household assets or family-level insights.
Outcome	Developed a centralized household management system that automates the grouping of family members, providing advisors with a single, accurate view of total household wealth and relationships.
My Role	Lead UX Researcher
Timeline	2 weeks per study, iterative over 1 Year & 3 Months.
Methods	Stakeholder Interviews, Discovery Research, Mental Model Mapping, Low fidelity Designs, Concept Testing
Impact	93% Adoption within 3 months; Established the firm’s first accurate baseline for household data reporting.

Business Context

Financial advisors help clients achieve their long-term goals by investing their assets.
A client is a Chase customer who invests their money with a Chase financial advisor.

J.P. Morgan Chase employs over 5,000 financial advisors.
They serve over 2.8 million households.
They manage over $1 trillion in assets under supervision.

Challenge: Develop a Household tool

The financial advisors manage households and we needed to develop a household tool for them.

Household Client: The tools did not allow financial advisors to combine clients into a household.
Workarounds: Financial advisors had to develop workaround methods to manage clients as a household.
Household Wealth: It was difficult for financial advisors to understand the household’s wealth.

The Quad

We operated within a "Quad" structure, ensuring tight alignment between Business, Product, Design, and Engineering. This collaborative model allowed us to pressure-test research findings against technical feasibility and business viability in real-time.

My Role & Responsibilities

I spearheaded the early stages of the project to get the project headed in the right direction.

Discovery Research: Understanding financial advisors' mental model around the households they manage.
Concept Designs: I designed the early concepts of the household tool based on the research interviews.
Hand-off: I handed on the design work for the MVP development.

The Process

Our process first focused on understanding the problem, develop solutions to that problem, then test the solution. And repeat any steps to develop high confidence for the MVP release.

Early Discovery

I conducted the early discovery research and we wanted to learn:

What are the financial advisors’ mental model on households?
What are the various household scenarios? From simple to complex.
What are the requirements for the household tool so financial advisors could do their job?

We learned

There are 3 spheres of a household, and the household tool needs to account for these 3 spheres of a household.

Framework

I developed a framework for the quad to outline the clear intent of the household tool.

First, the financial advisor creates the household.
Later, the financial advisor acts on the household.

Low Fidelity Concept Testing

I designed the early concepts of the household tool. As a quad (business, product, engineering, and design) we collaborated on the solution based on the research interviews with financial advisors.

I tested those concept designs to learn:

Usefulness
Intuitiveness
Missing Opportunities

Flow Map

I created a flow map to identify all of the scenarios and the steps in each scenario.

MVP Development

We assigned a UX designer to the project. She took ownership of the final design work. She worked with the quad (business, product, and engineering) to design the MVP. She also worked with the Design Systems team to match the design library.

Measuring Success

As the solution moves into development for a 2025 release, we have established a framework to monitor adoption and behavioral impact:

Pilot Group: We started with a small pilot group to identify any issues before releasing to all financial advisors. And we receive positive feedback from the pilot group, and we were able to fix minor issues.
Confirmed Households: To report the correct number of households under each financial advisor, the financial advisor had to confirm that all of their households were correct. This gave us accurate analytics to report.
Adoption: After releasing the household tool to all financial advisors, we got 92% adoption after 3 months.