USAA's Loss of a Loved One digital experience — a compass that walks surviving family members through every step of managing a decedent's accounts, across USAA and every external institution grief touches.
The Survivorship experience exists to actively engage the family member, friend, or representative who is managing a decedent's accounts. It is the most impactful and sensitive experience USAA offers. It touches every line of business — banking, insurance, investments, auto, home, life — at a moment when the member managing it all is in no condition to navigate anything.
It was also a growing problem. A growing member base, handled through a single channel (inbound phone), with unsustainable scalability. Every call started with the same sentence: "My wife passed away." And every call ended with a representative trying to route a human being through the most emotionally charged financial conversation they will ever have.
USAA's process for reporting the loss of a loved one was reactive. It required member-initiated phone calls and follow-up. The burden of navigating the death — USAA accounts, Social Security, the VA, life insurance policies, property titles, final expenses — fell entirely on the survivor, during the week they could least bear it.
Members had to tell their story again on every call. Call Survivor Relations, wait on hold, re-explain, get transferred, re-explain, follow up, re-explain. There was no way to see where they were in the process. No way to know what still needed to be done. No way to do it at their own pace, at 2am, in silence.
We built a digital experience that operates as a compass — a single place that lays out every step a family member needs to take, not just with USAA but with the Social Security Administration, the VA, insurance providers, and property records offices. Complete at their own pace. No phone required. 24 hours a day, any day, in any mood.
The experience surfaces support articles and hotlines contextually, recommends the next thing to handle, lets the member mark what's done, and calls nothing of the member's grief. It simply lights the way.
"A lighthouse in the fog."— USAA Member · Usability Testing · 2019
Before we spoke to members, we spent a week inside the Survivor Relations team — rotating among representatives, listening live to the member calls they were fielding. After each call we asked the rep for context: the pain points, the workarounds, the moments where they wished they could hand the member something other than more questions. That week set the emotional tone for the rest of the project.
Then we moved to members. Fifteen people who had lost a spouse or loved one within the last twelve months. Empathy became a working skill — how to ask, how to wait, how to sit with silence. Every member told us the same thing in different words: they dreaded having to tell their story again.
We ran a full-day workshop with 32 participants — five of whom were members who had lost a loved one in the last one-to-three years. Through multiple human-centered design activities we arrived at a "sketch a prototype" session that produced five distinct epics members wished USAA had offered them during their experience.
Working with those members to co-design was a highlight of my time at USAA. The ideas that shipped first came from people who had lived the problem.
I built four low-fidelity prototypes from the workshop outputs, worked closely with product owners and Survivor Relations reps to stress-test them, and rolled them into a single high-fidelity prototype ready for member testing.
We brought that prototype back to twelve more members who had experienced loss in the past twelve months. There were tears. A few members called it a lighthouse in the fog — surprised that a financial institution would be there for them when it mattered most. I learned how valuable a moment of pause can be during usability testing — to let the member reflect, remember, and then tell us what they actually saw on the screen.
The initial launch goal was 5–7% digital engagement within the first year. We surpassed it with 17% — more than two times the target — and the team received the 2018 Team to Market Award. Over the years that followed, the experience continued to climb as the project team grew and invested in the full lifecycle of member support.
More than the numbers: the internal story we brought to the USAA design organization permanently shifted how teams approach projects. I framed it as simply as I could:
Most people hope to get married, have children, buy a house, and retire. Not everyone does those things. But everyone dies. Design with the end in mind.— Internal framing at USAA, 2017
That line travelled. Awareness of the Survivorship project went up. Other teams started cross-collaborating earlier. The pattern of working with the most emotional extreme of the member journey in mind became — at least for a while — a company habit.
The most valuable skill I picked up on this project wasn't a method or a deliverable. It was learning when to stop talking. In usability testing, if a member paused on a screen and I rushed to ask the next question, I lost the real answer. If I waited — if I let the silence be silence — the member would usually tell me something more honest than any prompt could have pulled out of them.
That's the design discipline I carry into every AI-native project now. When an interface touches a person at a vulnerable moment — grief, confusion, anxiety, the first time they use a new AI system — the right response is rarely a louder prompt. It's the space for the person to bring themselves to the screen.
USAA is where I learned that. Everything I've done since is in conversation with it.