Transforming Estate Planning into an Interactive Client Experience
Project
Estate Flowcharting
Year
2024-2025
Estate planning conversations often rely on dense legal documents or manually created diagrams that are difficult for both advisors and clients to interpret. As lead designer and researcher, I partnered with wealth advisors, trust specialists, and fiduciary experts to design Northern Trust's first interactive Estate Flowcharting experience. All in all, transforming complex estate structures into clear, visual conversations that improve client understanding while creating a scalable foundation for future planning capabilities.
Scope of Work
The Opportunity.
Modernizing one of wealth planning's most requested capabilities.
Estate planning is one of the most important conversations wealth advisors have with clients, yet visualizing an estate often required manually recreating legal documents in PowerPoint or Visio. The process was time-consuming, inconsistent, and difficult to update as plans evolved.
The opportunity extended beyond replacing manual diagrams. Leadership wanted to create a standardized, interactive experience that fit naturally within the broader wealth planning ecosystem while supporting increasingly complex estate strategies over time.
Research & Key Insights.
Research at a Glance
Wealth Advisors
Trust Advisors
Fiduciary Specialists
Multi-region client research
Competitive analysis
Four rounds of concept testing
Organization-wide beta validation
Key Insights
Estate plans are difficult to understand because they're difficult to visualize.
Clients struggled to connect legal documents with how assets, trusts, and beneficiaries actually related to one another.
Advisors needed flexibility, not a one-size-fits-all visualization.
Some preferred concise diagrams for client conversations, while others relied on richer planning details throughout their workflow.
Visualization was only the beginning.
Helping advisors create a diagram mattered, but helping them confidently present, explore, and refine an estate plan created the greatest value.
SME Collaboration and Information Architecture Discovery
The Solution.
Create with Structure
Advisors shouldn't have to rebuild every estate plan from scratch.
We introduced standardized templates for common planning vehicles, including revocable and irrevocable trusts, wills, and additional estate entities. All in all, making it faster to construct accurate estate plans while preserving the flexibility required for more complex scenarios.
Empty State Flowchart
Adding a Revocable Trust
Basic Details of Revocable Trust
Beneficiaries at First Death Layer
Remainder Beneficiaries Layer
Communicate with Clarity.
Estate planning conversations require different levels of detail depending on the audience.
To support both advisor workflows and client presentations, we designed Standard and Simple visualization modes, allowing advisors to control the amount of information displayed without changing the underlying estate structure.
When deeper context was needed, every entity expanded into a detailed drawer containing valuations, ownership information, fiduciaries, and supporting planning details, keeping the visualization approachable while preserving access to critical information.
Simple View of Flowchart
Standard View of Flowchart
Drawer Opening Upon Card Selection
Explore with Confidence.
Visualization was only one part of the planning experience.
Interactive editing, fiduciary review, reporting, and connected planning workflows allowed advisors to move seamlessly from presenting an estate plan to refining and validating it. Overall, we helped reduce context switching while keeping planning conversations focused.
Review Fiduciaries Page
Page from Client Deliverable
Building the foundation for future planning.
Estate Flowcharting was intentionally designed as a starting point rather than a finished product.
Future enhancements include support for additional planning vehicles, wildcard estate entities, expanded reporting, and deeper integration with the broader wealth planning ecosystem. This will continue to allow advisors to manage increasingly sophisticated estate strategies within a single connected experience.
Miscellaneous Estate Item Exploration
Reflection.
This project reinforced that some of the most valuable design work isn't about simplifying the underlying problem; it's about making complexity easier to communicate.
Estate planning will always involve legal nuance and sophisticated financial strategies. The challenge wasn't removing that complexity; it was giving advisors better tools to explain it. Watching advisors recognize their own workflows in the product and seeing clients better understand how their estate plans fit together was truly the most rewarding outcome of the project.
