Automatic Required Minimum Distribution

My Role

UX lead responsible for defining the workflows, detailing the use cases, producing all design deliverables, running user testing, and ensuring design quality through development for an audience that is not always comfortable with technology.

Uncovering the Business Logic

The project began with stakeholder interviews. I met with product managers and sales representatives to understand the total flow of the experience, including its edge cases and error handling scenarios.

Mapping the complete workflow up front gave the team a shared understanding of every decision point and the inputs required from clients, laying the foundation for the design work that followed.

Designing the Entry Page

The entry page sets the tone for the whole experience: it has to explain what the tool does and get people comfortable enough to begin. My first direction paired that explanation with a warm lifestyle photograph of a retiree.

In moderated testing, the photo backfired. Instead of reading the value proposition, participants fixated on the person. They commented on her age and how she was different from them, or spun stories about what her life must be like. The image pulled attention away from the task and, for some, created distance rather than connection.

In response to the user testing results, I moved to an illustrated entry page. While the illustration was not universally praised, testing proved it was far less of a distraction. It set the right mood and got people into the experience more easily.

Flow Breakdown

With the framing set, I designed the full flow as five primary steps. Users are shown information and inputs progressively, so the experience is chunked into manageable decisions rather than one long form.

Error Handling

The happy path was only part of the work. Underneath it sat a long tail of edge cases that all had to be designed and written. A single decision, how the client wants their distribution delivered, branched into 13 potential error scenarios across mailing a check, direct deposit to a bank, and reinvesting into a non-retirement account, each with its own message, cause, and recovery action.

Another example can be found when clients split their RMD across funds by percentage. It has to respond in real time to an amount that exceeds an account balance, or allocations that do not add up to 100 percent, guiding the client back on track without ever making them feel stuck.

Additional Information States

Beyond errors, many screens needed information and validation states to guide clients before anything went wrong. I worked closely with a content strategist to define each one: what triggers it, what it says, and how to phrase it plainly for an audience that is not always comfortable with technology or financial jargon.

Calendar Complexity

Scheduling looked simple on the surface: pick the months and the day you want your distribution. Underneath, the date logic was some of the trickiest work in the project. A client can choose any combination of months, but individual months carry their own blackout days.

December blacks out the 25th through the 31st. January blacks out the 1st through the 5th. February only has 28 days, so the 29th through 31st never apply. Because a single day has to work for every month a client selects, the calendar has to resolve the combined rules and only offer the days that are valid across all of them.

Results

T. Rowe Price's Auto-RMD tool lets clients aged 72+ set and forget their Required Minimum Distribution independently, on their own time, with the peace of mind that once it is set up they do not need to come back and do it again every year.

By designing for the edge cases as rigorously as the happy path, and by validating the flow with real clients, the tool turned an annual source of calls and anxiety into something people could handle on their own time.