TIAA  (Teachers Insurance & Annuity Association)

Leading the digital evolution of a 100 year old brand

For two years, I led design and digital strategy for TIAA’s public web, shaping the digital expression of an enterprise rebrand for 5M+ customers across education, healthcare, and nonprofits. Helping make retirement planning and financial guidance easier to understand and navigate.

ROLE & CONTRIBUTION

Designing a modern, scalable marketing experience.

TIAA needed to evolve how millions of customers experienced retirement planning online. As Design Director, I led that digital transformation.

As design director, guiding a team of eight, I contributed in the experience design and digital strategy — designing user flows, defining visual systems and storytelling, and shaping strategy for the public web.

This required keeping teams aligned on priorities and fostering a culture of co-creation across Marketing, Legal, Product, Tech and agency partner, that helped to drive innovation, and speed.

Client: TIAA provides retirement & investment solutions to 5M+ participants in 3 market segments across education, healthcare, and nonprofit

Contibution: Direction, UI, UX, Strategy

Team: 8 cross-functional:
Darrin Amellio, Jeremy Bell
Eric Shoemaker and others

Mobile, an adaptive experience. The experience is focused, linear, and action-oriented. Goal is consistency while adjusting how information is revealed and how users move through it.

Who we're designing for

I worked closely with content strategists to ensure experiences met the needs and behaviors of three audiences — with a unified design language that felt relevant to each.

Participants: Individual contributors, retirees, and IRA clients across life stages. They are often navigating foundational questions and need clear, plain-language guidance that builds confidence before making decisions.

Plan Sponsors: Employers, HR leaders, and benefits managers responsible for plan administration. They need streamlined access to plan details, enrollment tools & performance insights that support operational decision-making.

Consultants & Advisors: Financial advisors and institutional consultants guiding plan sponsors. They require deeper analytics, comparative data, and flexible reporting tools to evaluate performance and shape recommendations.

CHALLENGE

Turning complexity into clarity

Prior to the redesign, customers across both B2C and B2B audiences were navigating a fragmented public web. Customer feedback: “Finding relevant information was difficult and took more time than expected.” Understanding offerings required effort, and moving confidently toward next steps wasn’t always clear.

I started by auditing roughly 1,400 existing pages with the team. Each page was reviewed and categorized: redesign, merge with related content, or sunset entirely. The goal was to reduce duplication and create a clearer structure for how information was presented.

Before: Legacy About page and  After: Rebrand, experience design

APPROACH

Trust, discoverability, and scale

Build trust through consistency. The rebrand was translated into a modern, accessible design language and a cohesive experience across touchpoints. Consistent visual patterns help keep users oriented within the TIAA ecosystem.

Make content discoverable. We redesigned the IA and navigation to guide users to related content without dead ends. Better UX copy and content strategy reduced bounce and kept people engaged and moving forward.

Scale efficiently. We built a ground-up Marketing Design System (MDS) including page templates as the foundation. It was later integrated directly into the CMS so teams could reduce production time to accelerate releases.

TIAA Public Web reimagined

My initial focus was on research and strategy to understand customer needs and emerging behaviors. People were consuming content differently in smaller, digestible moments rather than dense, multi-page experiences.

Focused on creating a clear visual language, purposeful navigation, and goal-driven content. The result was a more intuitive, cohesive journey that improved discovery, clarified next steps, and supported learning, driving engagement and long-term trust.

Design decisions were guided by core principles: 

Keep it clear: Scannable type, clear structure, and generous whitespace helps make complex financial information approachable. 

Human expertise: Honest photography, simplified iconography, and vibrant color built confidence and trust. As a leader, we made retirement feel approachable.

Made to motivate: Bold typography and energetic photo treatments kept users engaged and moving forward. We energized customers at every opportunity.

Design approaches for different goals

To bring structure to the legacy content, I defined page templates with the team, based on their purpose:

• Top-level pages: orient and guide
• Product pages: present offerings
• Informational pages: explain topics
• Campaign pages: focus on persuasion

Top level, Product, Informational, and Campaign

Designing for intent

Personalizing experiences. Not everyone arrives at TIAA’s website with the same needs or intent. Working with content and business strategists, I defined a research-driven personalization strategy that reduced noise and guided users to relevant content more quickly. We created three fixed experience variations based on user behavior, adapting headlines and select content blocks.

Creating a page narrative

I organize content into clear, purposeful blocks that shape hierarchy, support the story, CX, and guide page visitors toward the next step.

This initial approach helps clarify the information architecture, reduce cognitive load, and turn dense financial content into a more guided, scannable experience.

Bringing an experience to life

Motion played an important role in shaping TIAA's experience, used deliberately can guide attention, reinforce meaning, and create moments of delight while keeping TIAA experiences clear and accessible.

Immersive Flows

 Immersive Flows are long-scroll storytelling experiences with chapter navigation that break complex financial topics into approachable moments. They balance snackable insights with opportunities to dive deeper into TIAA’s products and services.

Building a storytelling framework

TIAA saw the need to evolve how it communicated with clients.  Immersive Flows introduced a long-scroll storytelling approach that organized complex financial topics into smaller, digestible chapters users could explore at their own pace.

I led cross-functional collaboration and workshops with stakeholders, SMEs, and agency partners to define an experience model.

Motion and micro-interactions sustained engagement as users moved through the experience, guiding attention and adding moments of energy and delight.

User-driven learning

Our starting point was research. We studied how people actually consumed financial information online. From this, the experience was designed for multiple learning methods:

Scanners: who scroll quickly, can learn through headlines and key visuals
Deep readers: who prefer a closer study, can learn more by clicking through to full-length articles.

Immersive flows for B2C and B2B

How do you guide someone through a complex topic without forcing them into a rigid path? How do you reduce cognitive load without oversimplifying the content?

Starting with Lifetime Income (LTI), and later extending the model to B2B experiences, we structured content into chapters, introduced persistent navigation, and designed modular content blocks that supported both sequential and non-linear learning. This shift changed the journey. Users could stay oriented, move at their own pace, and engage with deeper information when they were ready.

Experience Pathing

Understanding how customers move through the experience shaped our design decisions. Whether entering through organic search, paid campaigns, or internal links, we defined intentional paths that nurture engagement and boost conversions.

By mapping entry and exit points up front, we created guided journeys aligned with user intent. Transforming a once-fragmented site into a seamless, goal-oriented experience while giving stakeholders a shared, end-to-end view of the customer journey.

Mapping user flows gave stakeholders a shared, end‑to‑end view of the customer experience, and aligned teams around a unified strategy and messaging approach

Impact at a glance

The redesigned TIAA.com educates and empowers users while delivering measurable business gains. Its streamlined information architecture, focused storytelling, and data‑driven UX translate directly into higher engagement, deeper trust, and accelerated conversions:

• On the new homepage, enrollment starts surged by 80%
• Overall content engagement rate vaulted +40%
• The bounce rate fell significantly by 41%.
• Advice session with financial consultants grew by 94%
• SEO rank has skyrocketed by 76%
• With focus on simplicity. The new consolidated dot com experience features 50% fewer pages