Research changed what the team prioritized.
Then it became something leadership could see.
I joined GuideStone as the initial UX consultant hired by the UX manager, on a pilot product team set up to explore how the organization might create digital products differently. The work ran across two horizons at once: the member experience that already existed, and the generations GuideStone had not yet reached. Research with existing members changed what the team prioritized completing. A separate research thread pointed somewhere else entirely — and became Seedwise, the prototype at the end of this page.
The value, in twenty seconds.
I joined as the initial UX consultant hired by the UX manager, on a pilot product team set up to explore how GuideStone might create digital products differently. The work covered the existing myGuideStone member experience and future product opportunities at the same time.
Research in both directions: existing members and the experience serving them, plus 30+ generational interviews reaching well beyond the current membership. Findings were carried into product recommendations rather than a readout.
Member research changed the priority of what the team focused on completing. A separate generational thread became a product direction that reached company-wide executive evaluation, and later the prototype at the end of this page.
Research changed what the team worked on next.
myGuideStone is the existing member portal — where people monitor investments and interact with GuideStone’s financial experience. It already had members, balances and service relationships. What it did not have was a current, evidenced account of where those members were running into friction.
The work covered UX and design on the existing experience plus research across several sources: interviews with existing members, survey material, previously recorded interviews, help-desk and recurring support issues, stakeholder and frontline input, heuristic analysis of the current experience, and 30+ interviews spanning multiple generations. Those became experience opportunities handed to the product team as recommendations.
The research changed the priority of what the team focused on completing. Not a redesign — a reordering of work already in flight, on evidence rather than assumption.
Continuing to prioritize work primarily from internal assumptions rather than the needs and friction existing members were actually reporting.
Four synthesized opportunity areas came out of it — drawn across those inputs rather than voiced by every participant.
Connect financial experiences to real-life goals, not only accounts and balances.
Move beyond static information toward contextual help.
Digital and human service experiences need to work as one journey.
Different generations approach financial guidance differently.
The team was also testing how products could be created differently.
The pilot product team existed to explore how GuideStone might approach future product development, so the engagement was never limited to designing screens. Research, prioritization, cross-functional product thinking, prototyping and validation were all part of that experiment — the same arc Media Visionary runs now.
As the initial UX consultant hired by the UX manager, I also advised on enterprise UX capability: how mature UX organizations are commonly structured, how responsibilities divide, and where UX tends to sit in a large enterprise. That drew on earlier Fortune 25 experience building and leading UX capability, adapted to GuideStone’s own needs. The structure remained the manager’s to decide; the contribution was perspective and options.
They were already getting money advice. Just not from us.
One research thread pointed beyond the existing portal entirely. Existing members had accounts, balances and a service relationship. This audience had none of it — no institutional relationship, no balance to check, no reason to open a traditional financial app — and their money habits were forming anyway, on TikTok, YouTube and Reddit. Often the advice was good. Sometimes it was risky. It was never connected to anyone who knew their situation, and never accountable for the outcome.
The instinct inside financial institutions is to treat that as a marketing problem: same products, younger tone. The research pointed somewhere less comfortable. An institution cannot out-produce creators, and should not try.
What it has instead is what a creator structurally cannot offer — context about your actual situation, a fiduciary obligation, calibrated honesty about risk, and a qualified human you can escalate to. Two further constraints shaped the answer: a regulated organization cannot make specific recommendations without advisor review, and stewardship language is the genuine differentiator but also the fastest way to lose a 23-year-old.
That narrowed the product question to something answerable: what is the smallest thing that puts institutional judgement next to the content people are already consuming? The answer has a name in the prototype. It is the Wisdom Check.
Make the hypothesis tangible.
Seedwise is a later interactive concept prototype that translated the direction the GuideStone research pointed at into something concrete enough to evaluate and test. It was not launched by GuideStone. Its job was to turn an audience question everyone had opinions about into a specific proposition an organization could accept, reject, or put in front of users.
The wedge is the Wisdom Check. Rather than compete with creator content, it annotates it: a money claim gets a plain-language verdict in three parts — what is genuinely useful, what is risky, what to do next — plus a risk label and, where appropriate, a nudge toward an actual advisor.
A simple starting framework beats no plan. Automating on payday is genuinely good advice.
The percentages assume a cost of living this creator never states. In a high-rent city, "needs" alone can exceed 50% — and following the split anyway means quietly underfunding savings while believing you are on plan.
Start from your actual fixed costs, then set the split. Seedwise does the arithmetic and shows what is genuinely safe to spend.
Every card carries one of five labels. The taxonomy is the product’s honesty made visible — including the two labels that send the user away from the app and toward a person.
Seedwise — use it, don’t read about it.
The 11-screen concept covers onboarding, social-finance guidance, goals, budgeting, learning, advisor escalation and user preferences. It was built past the point of a clickable demo deliberately — budgeting math runs, goals compute against real numbers, the advisor route produces a shareable snapshot — so what gets evaluated is the proposition, not a rendering of it. Every number is mock data: no backend, no auth, no network call anywhere in it.
Interactive concept · 11 screens · Educational prototype, not affiliated with or offered by GuideStone.
Open in a new tab ↗Trust had to be designed into the product.
In regulated financial services the compliance layer is usually treated as a tax — small grey type at the bottom of the screen, written by counsel, read by nobody. Seedwise inverts that. The limits are stated plainly, in the interface, at the moment they are relevant, because in a category saturated with confident bad advice the willingness to say “I can’t tell you that” is a credibility signal. It is also what makes the faith framing work: stewardship language earns its place when the product visibly declines to profit from the user’s confusion.
- No specific securities, funds, portfolios or allocations are ever shown or recommended.
- No performance promises and no guaranteed outcomes, anywhere in the product.
- Creator content is labeled when it has not been advisor-reviewed.
- Anything that would constitute a specific recommendation routes to a qualified advisor.
- Disclosure is a designed component, not a footer — it appears where the claim appears.
Stead is the design system underneath the concept: deep navy and steady type for credibility, warmth and clarity so it is something you would actually open in the morning. Nine colors, one rule — color always means something. A palette where every value carries a fixed meaning is what stops a financial product from looking like a toy as it grows.
The concept reached executive judgment.
GuideStone’s company-wide Sparkathon put the product direction in front of internal executives. The concept won recognition — useful evidence that research had been translated into something concrete enough for leadership to evaluate.
What was presented was the product direction that later informed Seedwise. The interactive prototype shown on this page was built afterward to express that direction.
The prototype created a decision, not another research deck.
Most organizations do not have a research problem. They have a translation problem — findings everyone agrees with and nobody acts on, because a finding is not a decision. A concrete proposition that gets rejected is worth more than a well-received readout that changes nothing.
Member research changed what the team focused on completing.
Research became a specific, testable product hypothesis.
The future concept reached company-wide executive evaluation through Sparkathon.
The prototype established which assumptions should be tested next.
Prioritizing product work and future concepts primarily from internal assumptions, without enough connection to member evidence, operating reality, or a tangible proposition leadership could evaluate.
The point was never the prototype. It was knowing what to test first.
Does the Wisdom Check change what users understand, or what they do next?
Will younger users return without a balance to check — and does advisor escalation create value?
Can real data, workflow and compliance requirements support the concept?
Need research to change the roadmap —
or make a future product tangible?
If your team is sitting on findings nobody has acted on, or needs a concept concrete enough for leadership to make a real decision about, I can help you get from research to a working proposition in a short arc.
A note on this case study
- Three different things, kept separate
- The GuideStone research and product work was real enterprise work conducted during the engagement, June to October 2024. The Gen Z product direction was an opportunity developed from that research and taken into GuideStone’s internal innovation process, where it won Sparkathon recognition. Seedwise is the later interactive concept prototype built to make that direction tangible. Only the first two happened inside GuideStone.
- Seedwise is a concept prototype
- It is educational only — no real accounts, advice, recommendations or transactions — and it is not affiliated with or offered by GuideStone. All figures in it are mock data. No part of it was released as a GuideStone product, offered to members, reviewed by compliance counsel, or connected to real accounts. Disclosure language in the Stead system was drafted to be realistic for a regulated context; it has not been reviewed by counsel.
- Creator content in the prototype is fictional
- Creators, handles, claims and Wisdom Check verdicts in the feed are invented for demonstration. They are written to resemble real social financial content but reference no actual person or post.