Schwab Inheritance Center: Designing for grief at a distance

Schwab Inheritance Center: Designing for grief at a distance

Schwab Inheritance Center: Designing for grief at a distance

Updated case study image

A digital self-service experience for bereaved customers managing an inherited account at Charles Schwab. My role: lead and sole content designer.

Don’t design with empathy. Design for it.

  • The brief was simple: move the inheritance process online and reduce call volume without making grieving customers feel abandoned.

  • Testing showed people didn’t expect a bank to be their grief counselor. They wanted a product that treated them like capable adults going through something hard.

  • The core principle became: the product is the empathy.

Key decisions

I calibrated the voice, simplified naming around the deceased person, reduced the welcome experience, and turned a bureaucratic task list into a guided handoff. The final product moved the process from 0% to 100% digital adoption and beat V1 adoption expectations by 8%.