Role: Creative Director etc.

The objective of this Master's Capstone project was to understand the different product offerings that Sun Life Financial has and to identify key ways to engage with the millennial and new comer audiences through focused primary and secondary market research, a full fledged competitive analysis, and various digital solution strategies. The ideas that my team and I presented were regarded by the director of marketing as having the potential to help differenitate Sun Life Financial from it's competitors. I had the creative director role in this project, amongst several others.

UX/ Market Research and Digital Solution Development

Project Objective

This project was the final capstone project for the Master's of Digital Experience Innovation. My team and I's objective was to identify key ways to engage with the millenial and newcomer to Canada target audiences. As a team we were required to complete the following items with success:

Focused market research to gain insights on how to best engage millennial and newcomers with insurance and financial products through digital means
Competitive analysis of Sun Life Financial's direct competitors to understand Sun Life's position in the market place
Competitive analysis of innovative competitors to improve team creativity and application of engagement strategies for Sun Life
A creative digital solution strategy that includes several small actionable suggestions as well as four big concepts (net new means) that take investment and time to implement

Our Process

Overall, our team worked very well together despite a few areas of concern. A team mate and and I both had international components to our locations throughout this project, this resulted in a mutual understanding of each other’s situations. We had the ability to be very flexible and trusting if something came up that was not expected. The strong communication as well as effort helped us to accomplish tasks as a team in a timely manner, as well as strengthen the team bond and trust that we already had.

Our team's work ethic could be considered 11 out of 10 because we had so many different factors against us, yet we were able to still deliver a project of such magnitude on time, with quality and no delays in any part of the project. My team mate's work location caused time differences, which resulted in our need to respect when he could Skype and when he needed to go to bed. My family trip caused time differences, periods of being offline, the need to purchase data to function (which didn’t work initially). Despite the circumstances that were against us we over delivered to the client based on their feedback.

My Role(s)

Within this project, I had several different roles, as did the rest of my team as the project was large and we had a smaller team. The roles I took on during the project are outlined below:

Researcher: We all took on reading several industry reports and noted the most important finings and trends within the financial/ insurance industry. I was a researcher on the the general "insruance/ financial industry trends", which directly correlated to the Innovative Competitive Analysis Lead role. In addition, I also helped faciliate a survey with participants from our target audiences. The survey asked about our respondent's general opinions and experiences with the insurance and financial industry.

Innovative Competitive Analysis Lead: Through our secondary research, I began to notice several different competitors from the United States, that were noted in research reports. These competitors had very creative strategies to engage with their audiences. I created a list of these competitors and created a methodology for our team to analyze these competitors. I also conducted a website analysis of each of our innovative competitors as well as Sun Life (for base comparison). I came up with the website analysis through researching common criteria used for a UI/UX website competitive analyses and applied them directly to these competitors.

UI/UX Study Lead: Sun Life had given us a mobile app mock up that was on a webpage. I had taken this app and created a survey around it that tried to gain meaningful insights from our two target markets (millennials and newcomers). I created a website (http://nicolepapp25.wix.com/sunlifeapp) that housed an instructional video, written instructions as well as the survey itself for people to use. I helped my team facilitate recruiting individuals to take the survey. Prior to this, I gained feedback on questions, the survey process and overall language of our survey, from different individuals who were familiar with UI/UX. Once the improvements were implemented, the participants were recruited and took our survey, I analyzed the qualitative data by using coding to find themes and direct improvements. This survey later translated into one of our four large digital concepts – improvements to the current Sun Life app.

Creative Director: Throughout our entire project, I would try to facilitate different brainstorming sessions whenever it made the most sense. These brainstorming sessions were intended to use our key findings from research on the industry, findings from our competitive analyses and our survey results, to come up with creative solutions that the client can implement. I had used these different brainstorming sessions to guide our team into thinking of ways we can conceptualize these findings. I had also contributed the groundwork for 3 of the 4 final big digital concepts or “net new means” (Sun Life app re-design suggestions, Advisor Match and Health Competition).

Presentation Lead: Our client had asked our group to present in Toronto to their marketing executive team, as well as the required Stratford presentation. I had created both slide decks, which were custom designed using the report design as inspiration (created by Michelle Fujita) with my own creative flair. Unfortunately, when we sent the Toronto slide deck to the client, they preferred a design that was exactly the same as the report. Due to time constraint, Michelle and I ended up working together on the Toronto Slide Deck V2, using the exact images she had for each section.

Project Manager’s Assistant: Throughout our project, I would help Michelle organize prior to any meeting with the client by creating agendas, emailing the client If needed and to keep our team on track if needed.

Outcome

Personal Outcome:

A strong understanding of what a market research project consists of, to directly apply to my career
Feedback from the client that will help me improve myself as a team member and a leader
Improvement in my design skills
Proven results that I can present for 30 minutes without forgetting a line or presenting negatively, despite being nervous and stressed
A realization that I really enjoy market research and formulating survey questions, administering the survey and analyzing the data to present to a client for further action
A realization that I don’t enjoy meeting with my team when there isn’t a direct actionable outcome to the meeting (Ex: we will all debrief on this study, or come up with solutions by the end of the meeting etc.). Meeting for the sake of meeting is not always a productive use of time

UI/UX & Marketing Deliverables

Below are examples of design work and user work flow mock ups I completed for this project:

Custom Branded Slide Deck:

I created this slide deck based on Sun Life Financial's Style guide, using the exact HEX codes included. My slide deck design and layout was based on both the design exemplars shown in the style guide, as well as the content and direction of our final UI/UX Project.

Each slide was designed with a specific purpose in mind, using Adobe photoshop and illustrator for the entire design process.

STYLE GUIDE: