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This case study is WIP. For now, this is a showcase of some UXR prototypes and interaction design.
Launching the Automated US Treasury Bond Ladder
Company
Wealthfront
Date
2023
Role
Design Lead
From the Automated Bond Ladder landing page.
Product development process
I was part of the core team that developed the vision and strategy for this product from it's conception. The team included product, design, research, data, engineering, and leadership. We followed Wealthfront's well documented product development process, which involved:
  • The team collaborating on multiple iterations of a blog post/press release.
  • Market research, which reinforced that bonds were/are having a moment and we had an opportunity.
  • Client research, where data science looked into client data, and interviewed clients to see artifacts of cobbled-together solutions.
  • The investing research team investigated viability of supporting new fixed income instruments.
  • I co-facilitated a design sprint to define the problem statement, value hypothesis, and target segments. We then generated a landing page and mobile prototype of the vision.
  • The research team ran customer development interviews targeted at our defined desperate customer, so we could gauge desperation and willingness to pay.
  • We presented all findings back to leadership for a "founders feedback" presentation, and official go/no-go decision.
  • As a team, we scoped and planned the next 3-6 months worth of work, including design, research, and engineering milestone estimates.
UXR round 1
Onboarding and ladder setup
Because a laddering strategy is quite advanced, and US Treasuries are not super commonly known, we spent a good deal of time learning ourselves about how bond ladders worked. We iterated a lot to simplify the concept, while balancing this with the knowledge that our target customer was at least somewhat familiar with the concepts involved in laddering fixed income instruments.

The first round of user testing was focussed on the onboarding and ladder setup phase of the journey, where we had identified the "ah-ha" moment being when a client first sees the ladder visualization.
Mapping the user journey, and a messy (sorry not sorry) working file.
Merchandising and introduction (this is a long page), then getting started.
Examples of asking "suitability" questions, required as an advisory product.
Experimenting with providing more guidance and a recommendation.
Showing different ladder durations to gauge interest.
Injecting (low-fi) educational content to boost comprehension.
Confirming ladder settings before making a deposit.
UXR round 2
Ongoing management
The second phase of the user journey was post-setup, where it was important to show how much the ladder was earning over time. We also learned that clients saw importance in being able to customize their ladder settings, and have options to move money out of the ladder as bonds matured.
Going down rabbit holes trying to figure out how to calculate interest.
Some updates to the setup screens based on learnings from UXR.
Another new screen added for when setup is complete.
A concept for the ladder dashboard, with some different visualizations.
And also...
Ladder interaction concepts
Because the ladder setup and visualization does such a good job of communicating the strategy, I spent a lot of time working on different concepts, visuals, and interactions. Here's the working file, and some of my favorite concepts that didn't make it.

I know people joke that we draw rectangles for a living, but I can't even attempt to count how many rectangles exist in this file.
One of a few files showing some of the borderline obsessive iteration.
Expanding cards and animations. Figma struggled with this one.
An animation explaining a concept we didn't end up using.
Down to 1 pixel rungs to try and fit long ladders into the viz.