Creating a Membership Platform for Canadian Actuaries
UX & SaaS Implementation
Research & Design • Product Strategy • End-to-End
Enterprise Client Project
December 2023
The What
This case study follows an enterprise project that I took end-to-end as a UX Researcher & Designer at Wicket Inc. It took place over the course of a year and a half, starting in the month that I joined the company - so, in many ways, it’s defined my tenure working there. The project started with a comprehensive product discovery, and was followed followed by a redesign of the client website and an integration of the Wicket product through a user-facing member portal. Our ultimate objective was to build a robust digital ecosystem for the CIA’s members and partners, while building a repeatable base solution that we could apply to future clients of Wicket.
The Why
The Canadian Institute of Actuaries, like many other professional associations, built its digital infrastructure on what’s referred to as an Association Management Software (AMS) many years ago. This category of software was born out of a need for associations to manage their members on a centralized B2C platform, while also providing them with the auxiliary features expected of their member relationship.
In the time since its digital conception, the CIA’s reach in the Canadian actuarial space has grown exponentially, and the needs of its members have followed suit. In their attempts to better serve these needs, they have curated a stack of best-in-class digital tools for their members - including an events platform, a learning management system, and a volunteer management system. As they’ve moved to modernize their member’s digital experience, some critical gaps in their infrastructure have emerged, all of which tie back to their continued use of an AMS to power their product.
With time, the features of the AMS that were once auxiliary have expanded. Having been established as the dominant means to manage members in the digital world, AMS’s evolved their scopes to also act as content management systems, ecommerce solutions, event platforms, and more. This creates a dilemma for associations: do they commit to building their full membership product on the AMS, or do they only use it to manage their membership data and host the “auxiliary” features elsewhere?
For the CIA, they came to use with a combination of the two options – despite the best-in-class tools they’ve curated, they were tethered to their AMS for some of their core digital offerings – namely, content management, document management, eCommerce, and of course membership management. This has created data siloes, administrative burden, and a fractured membership experience that’s bottlenecking their ability to grow with their market. This is where my team and I at Wicket came in.
The How
Discovery
The CIA has more than half a century of history to its brand, serving upwards of 6000 members across North America in English and French – meaning, this project was going to be a comprehensive undertaking. To ensure our bases were covered we kicked off with a 3-month discovery process that explored their website, portal, membership, data structure, external tooling, and data migration requirements.
My Role
Content Audit
Discovery Planning
Workshop Development
Workshop Facilitation
Knowledge Management
UX Planning
With a body of discovery data at our disposal, we then created a detailed UX Deliverable package to guide our building process. This included strategy outlines, personas, an information architecture proposal, and functional feature scope documentation.
My Role
Qualitative Analysis
Quantitative Analysis
Requirements Gathering
Establish Internal Alignment
Create All UX Deliverables
Establish Client Alignment
Prototyping
Once aligned on the details, we then fleshed out our functional requirements and grounded them in interactive prototypes that underwent 3 rounds of revisions. We prototyped over 60 pages that were accompanied with 15 diagrams and 150+ pages of user stories.
My Role
Create Design Taxonomy
Prototype Priority Planning
Wireframe Building & Revision
Create Dev Documentation
Outline eComm Configurations
Write User Stories
Implementation
Finally, we moved to implementation, where we spent 6 months turning our concept into a live membership ecosystem, iterating on our plan many times over in the process. This included building the website & member portal, setting up the eCommerce storefront, creating the link with the Wicket product, integrating third party tools, and migrating data from the old system to the new one.
My Role
Plan Web-Wicket Data Flows
Project Sprint Board Set Up
Establish Priorities with PM
Feedback Solicitation & Iteration
User Acceptance Testing
Client Training
More on the process
You can view a more detailed breakdown of the end-to-end process, along with project artefacts, outlined in the following gated PDF. If you’re interested in learning more, but haven’t been granted access yet, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or request it through Google Drive.
The Outcome
The first phase of the project went live in early December, with the refreshed website and member portal in currently in production and undergoing post-launch stabilization as of December 2023. The remaining two phases successfully launched in early 2024. Through this project, my team and I were able to create a new foundation for the Canadian Institute of Actuaries to build their product on – one that is modular to all their external tools, reflective of their member needs, and boasts a refreshed user interface.
Some notable features that I owned include:
Designing comprehensive onboarding flows for all 10 of their membership categories
Designing 5 user directories, each with unique data flows and target users
Designing interactive Event, Volunteering, and LMS interfaces in the member portal
Designing a 10,000+ Document Publication Database with advanced search capabilities
Designing 6 interoperable WordPress post types and their associated taxonomies
Designing the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) activity tracking tool
Internally, we were also able to use this project as a pilot for our renewed approach to service delivery. We used data from this project to start building a repeatable base service solution that cuts down discovery time by 30% and prototyping by 50%. Moving forward, this gives us the opportunity to reduce the activation energy needed for each client and introduce cross-project usability testing.
I’m looking forward to seeing what’s in store for this project and all those using it as a baseline in the future.
