Money stress … it can push people to finally search for advice. Almost yearly the American Psychological Association reports that money tops their list of what causes people to worry. Financial fears and uncertainty impact many aspects of people’s lives and their ultimate search for happiness. When a prospective client comes to you, they may say they want functional solutions, but they also want to ease their financial anxiety.
On this Elementality, Reese and Carl discuss a factor advisors overlook when trying to quiet client financial worries—and that factor overarches more than you might expect. Find out how using good design principles can calm tensions, inspire tranquility, and why they are integral to the Elements Way.
Podcast Transcript
[music]
Reese Harper:
Really, the first thing that people feel when design is done poorly is they feel dumb. They don’t think it is bad.
Carl Richards:
Dumb or anxious.
Reese Harper:
Dumb or anxious.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. Yeah.
Reese Harper:
In some cases they feel like it’s their problem. And this is the classic problem we have in finances.
Carl Richards:
Right.
Reese Harper:
Oh, it’s too fancy for me. I guess I don’t really get it. I’m gonna pretend like I’m…
Carl Richards:
Yeah. I don’t understand.
Reese Harper:
Don’t understand it. I can’t get involved.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
Good thing I hired Reese, he can figure it all out.
Carl Richards:
I’m not a math person.
Reese Harper:
So, they disengage.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
And what happens when they disengage? My cost goes up, right? I now have a more expensive firm to run.
Carl Richards:
I don’t have a chance to make the impact.
Reese Harper:
I have more staff that I have to hire to be able to follow up and collect information. I can’t have the impact. I can’t get the advice adherence.
Abby Morton:
Hey, it’s Abby. Looking for a way to demonstrate your full value and get more clients? Elements is here to help. In fact, we’re so confident we can help. We’ll guarantee it. That’s right. Starting today, if you sign up with Elements and don’t get a new client in the first 90 days, we’ll refund your money. Don’t wait, act today. Go to getelements.com/demo. Can’t wait to hear from you.
Abby Morton:
Welcome to Elementality. Each week, Reese and Carl, share their philosophy about financial planning as they explore the emotional and functional jobs that need to be done with a focus on the Elements financial monitoring system. Elementality will show you how to deliver a modern client planning experience and help you revolutionize how to grow your business. Enjoy.
Reese Harper:
Welcome to another show, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me, I’m Reese Harper. Here is your trusty old co-host, Dr. Carl Richards.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
Are you doctor?
Carl Richards:
No. No. No.
Reese Harper:
Okay. You feel very official.
Carl Richards:
I’d still feel really bad about that.
Reese Harper:
Correction, compliance. This is not a doctor, doctor of the snow, doctor of the mountains in an informal way. I look to Carl to guide me up to the top of Fiverr Horn.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
With that segue, I’d like to pivot to our topic of the day.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
Climbing a mountain, a metaphorical mountain, which few have summited, which is the mountain of beautiful design.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
Why do you think design, Carl, is so essential in our philosophy at Elements? Why is it one of the core principles of the way?
Carl Richards:
Yeah. No, look, design matters a lot. And the challenge, I mean, good design, most people don’t even know that that’s the thing that you’re feeling.
Reese Harper:
Okay.
Carl Richards:
But like when you hold your iPhone in your hands, and it’s hard to even remember what it felt like to hold your flip phone Nokia. But when you hold your iPhone in your hand, what you’re feeling is design, like thoughtful, well designed product, right? So, you probably won’t call it that. You’ll just be like, oh, I love this thing, right? And so design, to me the reason design matters in financial services is because nobody else does it. I mean, that’s one of the first reasons, like nobody has ever said, I love the way my brokerage statements feel or look, right? This is completely devoid and there’s an emotional connection to good design. And I think in our industry, speaking broadly, the lack of design leaves this opportunity for us to feel, especially because everything is intangible. You know, like what we deal with is intangible. Like the money is intangible, the goals, purpose, values, all these things are intangible. You get these things that you do see and touch, the app that you’re using, the website you log into, the printed piece of paper, if there’s room to breathe, right? If it talks to you and in a calm way. It feels calm, it feels well organized. You might even use a word like sexy [laughter], which we had somebody use about the product.
Reese Harper:
Yeah.
Carl Richards:
Or beautiful. Like that increases confidence, it increases the ability people have to stick to the plan they want. You want to engage with something that you enjoy engaging with.
Reese Harper:
Yeah.
Carl Richards:
But all of that stuff is very intentional, subtle, but really intentional. I even think like the use of white space and sometimes in our case black space, right? Just the use of like something can breathe, it doesn’t feel rushed or cramped or urgent or worried.
Reese Harper:
Yeah.
Carl Richards:
That everything we’re trying to do is speak, relax, be here. It’s all good. We’ve got you.
Reese Harper:
Yeah. An example of this that you’ll notice that I think’s really critical in the product is like, we’re pretty intentional about the volume of fields that we allow, right? I mean, if you think about a house, for example, like I have all kinds of fields that I would love to track around an asset, square footage, acreage, ratio of acreage used, available space in the building envelope for expansion of real estate remodeling, depth versus width of a lot. Because I’m trying to like think about all the future problems that might come up by living in a particular location. Like, will this client actually need to readjust their home? And plan for the contingency of that down the road. I’m thinking of size, of course, valuation basis, you know, tax basis.
Carl Richards:
Right.
Reese Harper:
Property tax value. I could go on and probably list 50 fields.
Carl Richards:
Right.
Reese Harper:
Because I’ve obsessed over how much information I would like to collect about a piece of real estate.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
If I presented that to the end client.
Carl Richards:
Please don’t do…
Reese Harper:
They will get just so overwhelmed by that.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
They will feel like they’re not smart enough, that the system wasn’t designed for them, it’s not technical, it’s too technical. Who cares and why do you need this?
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
Really the first thing that people feel when design is done poorly is they feel dumb. They don’t think it is bad.
Carl Richards:
Dumb or anxious.
Reese Harper:
Dumb or anxious.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. Yeah.
Reese Harper:
In some cases they feel like it’s their problem. And this is the classic problem we have in finances.
Carl Richards:
Right.
Reese Harper:
Oh, it’s too fancy for me. I guess I don’t really get it. I’m gonna pretend like I get…
Carl Richards:
Yeah, I don’t understand.
Reese Harper:
Don’t understand it. I can’t get involved.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
Good thing I hired Reese, he can figure it all out.
Carl Richards:
I’m not a math person.
Reese Harper:
So, they disengage.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
And what happens when they disengage? My cost goes up, right?
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
I now have a more expensive firm to run.
Carl Richards:
I don’t have a chance to make the impact.
Reese Harper:
I have more staff that I have to hire to be able to follow up and collect information. I can’t have the impact. I can’t get the advice adherence. In the design, it’s also not just visual.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. Yeah.
Reese Harper:
Right? That’s what you highlighted in your iPhone example.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
Design, it’s about function. If you don’t know, there’s several ways to design software. You know, you can design something on native code that’s built for a device, specific to a device. It runs on a device, Elements, the consumer app, if you put it on airplane mode, the app still runs. You know, because it’s a piece of software that’s fully running on the device, which is very different from a web application.
Carl Richards:
Right.
Reese Harper:
So if I’m on an airplane, I’m like, you know how to knock out a couple of these things that I know I was supposed to do.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
Like how many people do I know who have told me, yeah, I do a lot. The airplane is where I actually end up doing things that I don’t normally do.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
Whether it’s a riding project or catching up on some tasks or email.
Carl Richards:
Did I just fall asleep?
Reese Harper:
Yeah. You just fall asleep. [laughter]
Carl Richards:
Before we even take off.
Reese Harper:
So I’m just saying that the feeling of like, I can control my experience. I feel like it’s snappy. I feel like it was designed for my device. Like all of that matters. Not just because it looks good, but it has cost and advice adherence and client experience and sales conversion and marketing experience. Like all of those benefits like you pick up from good design.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. I mean, I do think like function is at the core of good design. And then this idea too, it is been really thoughtful in working with the designer here, turn around, well, and even the developers.
Reese Harper:
Maps, everybody. Yeah.
Carl Richards:
Right? There’s also a sense of constraint of like, look, we can, we’re only because you so often there’s this sense of how much can I fit in? That’s what our industry’s really good at. Like you go to any industry conference and you have to deal with 12 point font on a PowerPoint with 72 bullet points.
Reese Harper:
Yeah.
Carl Richards:
Like Michael Kors’ style. [laughter]
Reese Harper:
Shout out.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. And at least the design approach we’ve taken here is the opposite. Like, what can we get rid of and still do the job?
Reese Harper:
Yeah. And there’s a place, obviously for different design approaches, sometimes like at Elements, for example, one of the differences like what Carl’s describing in design has a lot to do with the client experience that we’re envisioning.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
Sometimes the opposite is also true for the advisor experience. So we have a dedicated web app that’s only designed for the advisor.
Carl Richards:
Yep.
Reese Harper:
That was our V1 launch. And if you look at the client list and the insights view, you’re gonna see that we have purposefully made it data dense. It’s data dense. You can see your entire clientele, you can sort clientele by net worth. You can sort clientele by liquidity. You can sort clientele by one of their financial vital signs.
Carl Richards:
Yep.
Reese Harper:
You can sort clientele by all kinds of, you can filter by financial health metrics. Like who has less than three months of liquidity? I just wanna see those people, who has a savings rate below 5%?
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
Like that’s a data dense, but thoughtfully…
Carl Richards:
That’s what I was gonna point out.
Reese Harper:
Thoughtfully curated.
Carl Richards:
Data dense but it’s still very, I would use the word beautiful and functional.
Reese Harper:
It was designed for a very specific purpose, right?
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
I wanna be able to take in my clientele in one view and triage the problem that I think is most acute right now, if you’re thinking about, well, let’s try to make the user experience be the same for clients and advisors. You get a lot of mixed kind of reaction. And in some cases you want to have the same user interface that both experience, for example, the scorecard. You don’t wanna have a different, you want the advisor to be able to see the scorecard in the same way the client’s seeing the scorecard.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
So they can talk about it and look at it together at the same time. But there’s some jobs the advisor’s gonna do that they are only done by the advisor and you want to be able to use the full real estate of their computer, because you know they’re gonna be looking at the data.
Carl Richards:
Yep.
Reese Harper:
So like we’ve tried to look at every interaction in terms of who’s the user experiencing this, what’s the function or the purpose of this interaction and how should that affect the space we use and the device type that we use? And I just think that you’ve gotta be thoughtful about that as a software business, but more importantly as it relates to you as an advisor, your client is making these judgment calls, intuitively the minute they pick up the device.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. And I think that to me that’s the real point here is, number one, that we’ve been incredibly thoughtful about design. And that every little thing has been thought through. Those are intentional decisions. But number two, that an advisor would be helped by us all understanding this principle of the way, which is design matters, beautiful design matters. And that’s all the way down to like the way you feel when you walk. There’s a difference between a space when you walk in and feel calm and a space when you walk in and feel anxious.
Reese Harper:
Yeah.
Carl Richards:
Like, you know the difference between those feelings. And Kansas State did that great research on what our office space should look like. And it’s much more like a high end architect space than it is a bank.
Reese Harper:
Yeah.
Carl Richards:
One makes you feel calm and like there’s an open book and we’re gonna design something, and one makes you feel scared and intimidated and nervous. And that’s a function of design. So thinking about office space, thinking about the way you answer the phone, thinking about that pile of, you know, you walk in and there’s a stack of 14 stacks of printout paper on your desk. What does that communicate? I mean, all of that is design.
Reese Harper:
That’s beautiful, man. You’ve been a great example of carrying this principle in a lot of ways throughout your career and just glad to have your influence in on this collaboration. So keep in mind the technology that you put in front of your client speaks louder than some of the things you say.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. Amen.
Reese Harper:
And I think that’s really critical.
Carl Richards:
Perfect.
Reese Harper:
Carry on everybody.
Carl Richards:
Cheers.
Reese Harper:
Have a great one.
Abby Morton:
Next time on Elementality.
Reese Harper:
The barrier or the hurdle that it sometimes feel like, oh, this is a new language I have to teach my clients. Actually turns out that you were either gonna teach them an old language.
Carl Richards:
Yes.
Reese Harper:
That it wasn’t really serving anybody, anyway. And you were gonna sit there and try and explain it over and over and over and you weren’t gonna do a good job, ’cause you’re not very good at it.
Carl Richards:
It’s hard.
Reese Harper:
No offense. I mean, like I think I’m really good at language and I couldn’t get it done, and I had to draw it, right? And I think you…
Carl Richards:
You had to draw pictures?
Reese Harper:
Yeah, I did draw pictures. There’s like Pictographs. So now I think the other thing that new language showed up here is in the form of design, like we talked about earlier. Like just the way it feels is a new language. And I think there’s something really powerful to that. Like what this is fresh, this is new.
Abby Morton:
To find out more about Elements, go to getelements.com/demo. Elementality executive producers are Reese Harper and Carl Richards. Elementality is produced by Tad Henderson and directed by Abby Morton. Have a good one.