Metlife Personal Finance
Navigating to What Matters
Challenge: Despite having robust features and powerful financial tools, users weren't discovering key functionalities within the MetLife personal finance app, preventing them from realizing the app's full potential.
Mission: Redesign the navigation and information architecture to help users easily find what they need, clearly understand MetLife's best offerings, and increase engagement with the app's most valuable features.
Service
Product Design
What we did
User flows
Prototyping
Interaction & visual design
Development hand-off
Discovery workshop
Our process began with a two-day workshop led by Josh Williams, bringing together key product stakeholders. Our design team explored multiple conceptual directions, using dot-voting exercises to identify the strongest elements. This collaborative approach helped us determine that reimagining the navigation system would deliver the most impact.
Navigation Concepts & Testing
After the workshop, our team developed six distinct navigation concepts and created detailed prototypes for testing. I worked with researcher Lauren Todd to build a comprehensive research plan, while collaborating with fellow designers Yafan Wu and Julie Griffin to prepare variations for evaluation. Through usability testing, we uncovered critical insights that guided our design decisions and helped establish consensus on the final direction.
Key Research Findings
Our research revealed critical insights that guided our navigation redesign strategy. Testing uncovered user pain points with the existing structure, while highlighting opportunities to make high-value features more discoverable. These findings provided clear direction for our redesign decisions and helped us prioritize improvements that would have the greatest impact on user engagement.
Central Money Hub
Our research uncovered which features users struggled to find and which navigation concepts tested best. These insights guided our design decisions and helped us prioritize improvements with the greatest potential impact.
Intuitive Category Structure
We reorganized the money section into four intuitive categories that help users quickly find what they need. The Spend, Borrow, Save, and Protect structure creates clear pathways to financial tools while making the app's organization more logical and accessible.
Toolkit & Insights
We created two key sections to improve feature discovery. The Toolkit surfaces previously hidden financial tools and partner integrations, while the Insights area provides personalized content and guidance in an organized, accessible format.
Enhanced Search & Navigation
We repositioned settings to the bottom navigation and enhanced search capabilities throughout the app. These research-based changes significantly improve how users discover and access both common and specific features.
The Impact
Our navigation redesign transformed user interaction with MetLife's app. Features in the Toolkit section saw significantly higher engagement, especially the student loan forgiveness integration.
The new structure creates a scalable framework for future growth. Users can now easily discover valuable features that were previously hidden.
Credits
Head of Design
Josh Williams
Design Support
Yafan Wu, Julie Griffin
UX Research
Lauren Todd
Product
Sri Beniki, Jorge Beltran