№00
At a Glance
36
Years in business
LPL’s first consumer ad campaign, May 2025.
22
Pages shipped
2 rebuilt, 20 new.
100
Component design system
Everything came from it.
≈3×
Traffic to the original pages
Measured across November and December.
№01
Long Story Short
In May 2025, LPL ran its first consumer ad campaign in 36 years of business.
National TV, print, out of home, Anna Kendrick. Their CEO said in the press release that they were introducing the firm to consumers for the first time.
At that point the website had exactly 2 pages aimed at investors. Everything else, you asked your advisor. Every time.
We rebuilt those 2 and added 20 more. I designed 10 of the new ones, plus the rebuild of Find an Advisor.
Traffic to the original 2 roughly tripled. Advisors reported converting considerably more investors into clients.
Then, with everything already live, I got lost on a page I had designed myself.
That led to the change I am proudest of here, and it cost us an extra month.
№02
The Challenge
Put everything LPL offers investors on the site, without burying anyone.
LPL is a Fortune 500 wealth management firm. The advisor side of the site was built out over decades. The investor side was two pages.
Investors are not one group. Someone with $50,000 saved and someone with $20 million planning a wealth transfer land in the same place and want completely different things.
The constraints
Constraint 01
AEM components only.
The site is assembled from prebuilt blocks, so every solution had to fit inside what engineering had already built.
Constraint 02
A 100 component design system.
Everything came from it.
Constraint 03
Compliance.
Every word went through review, so copy always landed late.
Constraint 04
Advisors were the existing channel.
Whatever we shipped had to help them, not compete with them.
№03
Role, team and timeline
Product Designer. 6 months. 11 pages, at least 2 directions each, and I ran the stakeholder review for every one of mine, presenting straight to LPL’s VP of Design and the business stakeholders.
1
July
Onboarded
2
Early August
First batch live, 4 to 5 pages including the 2 rebuilds
3
Mid September
The rest live, 22 in total
4
Late September
Got lost looking for my own page
5
October
Renaming and rebuilding the navigation
6
November to December
Measuring
TEAM
Lead Product Designer
VP of Design at LPL
Content Writer
AEM specialist
me
NOT MINE
The VP set the information architecture. My lead designed the other half. Every word of copy was written by the content team.
№04
What we found
A report kicked the whole thing off.
Visitor data
advisor surveys
advisor interviews
Advisors had become a human search engine.
Every basic question routed through a person. Fine for a first meeting, expensive across millions of clients.
Mobile was the surprise.
Most of the traffic came from phones. I had assumed desktop, because the old site was built for advisors at their desks and I carried that straight over to a different set of audience.
We never spoke to an investor. Not once.
In regulated wealth management the relationship belongs to the advisor and you do not get to go around them. Advisors were the closest proxy we had, at every stage, including how we measured the result at the end.
№05
The decisions I made
The way we worked came out of a mistake I made in my first weeks.
THE MISTAKE
I wanted motion on a few pages. The design system said the components supported it, so I had the creative team build GIF options and put them in the designs. In review the VP asked if this was actually buildable. I said yes. The AEM team came back two days later and said no.
Back to the creative team for static images. Days of their work gone, deadline pushed.
So I proposed we flip the order.
Build it in AEM first, confirm it works, then take it to review. That killed most of the back and forth for the rest of the project.
THE LESSON
The lesson is narrower than “check your assumptions.” A design system tells you what was designed, not what was built. I had been treating those as one question.
2 directions for every page.
Different components, different hierarchy, different links at the bottom. When the kit is fixed, design becomes a hierarchy decision, and 2 options force the room to argue about hierarchy instead of taste.
Then I sat with the AEM team to try and break them.
Text that fits beautifully in Figma reflows into something else when the column narrows. Plenty of finished-looking work fell apart in those sessions, which is exactly what they were for.
To be clear, this was not a split test. No live variants, no metric picking a winner. Just options hardened against reality, then a real choice for stakeholders.
We designed the shape of the page before the copy existed.
Sections, order, and a text ceiling for each one, sent to the content team as a brief. That let AEM build structure while copy sat in compliance, so 3 things ran in parallel instead of queued behind each other.
Private Wealth Management came second, on purpose.
Not my call, but the right one. General investor first, high net worth after. One set of pages could not have served both properly.
№06
What Broke
Late September. Everything was live. I went to check a page I had designed and I could not find it.
I knew what it was about. I could not remember what it was called.
TWO PROBLEMS STACKED
The navigation was crowded and hard to scan.
And we had named pages using our internal terms, which meant nothing to an investor.
We had been living in this content for months, so every name felt obvious to us. We were the ones who made them up.
I took it to my lead, then we went to the VP together.
Rename the pages that needed it.
Add a short description under every nav link so you know what is behind it before clicking.
THE TRADEOFF
The descriptions were not free. They add height to a menu that was already crowded. A taller menu you can read beats a compact one you cannot.
5 - 6
OF 20 NEW RENAMED
Less renaming than you would expect. Both original pages, and 5 or 6 of the 20 new ones.
October still went entirely into it. Every description written, cleared by compliance, held to one line, checked against the page titles. Then every renamed page traced so no existing link broke.
You can check the result. As of mid 2026, Individual Investors is the only section on LPL.com where every nav link carries a description underneath it. Advisors and Institutions are still bare link lists.
Top: Individual Investors megamenu, bottom: Advisors megamenu. As of August 2026.
№07
Where it landed
4 groups, plainly named, each with a line explaining what is inside.
Getting Started With LPL
New to the firm, or your advisor recently moved over
Growing Your Wealth
Private Wealth Management
Market Insights and Resources
Tools, calculators, commentary,
22
PAGES
|
0
CUSTOM COMPONENTS
All of it assembled from blocks that already existed. That was deliberate, not a compromise, and it means nothing in here needs a designer or a developer around to maintain it.
The pages are already live. Find an Advisor is the rebuild. Investors New to LPL is a good example of a new one. The rest sit under the Individual Investors menu.
№08
Details I sweated
I designed the mobile version so that it could not break.
TWO RULES
Every section got a hard text ceiling, which went to the content team as part of the brief.
Every image slot got a fixed aspect ratio.
Nothing overflows when the column narrows, and no image crops into nonsense, so a photo of two people talking never becomes a photo of a shoulder. What gets approved on desktop is what shows up on the phone.
IT HOLDS WITHOUT ME
Best part is that it holds without me. A writer working to a word count and an AEM author dropping an image into a fixed slot cannot accidentally break the layout.
I taught myself AEM to fix things nobody had flagged.
Once pages went live I kept spotting small things off. Padding that did not match. Spacing going irregular at certain widths. Images cropping wrong. Nobody had raised any of it, but it is the difference between a page that looks considered and one that looks assembled.
So I learned enough AEM to open a test page and change things myself. I rebuilt the problem sections there, checked them on desktop, tablet and mobile, and sent the team exact fixes instead of vague complaints. “This padding value at this breakpoint” gets done. “This looks off” gets queued.
Which is how I found that Figma and production had drifted apart.
The design system in Figma and the components actually running on the site were no longer the same thing. The GIF problem from my first weeks was a symptom of it. I just had not understood the cause at the time.
I raised it with my lead and the VP and got approval to start fixing the Figma system against live AEM. Notes on LPL Design System
Contrast had no guardrail, so I became the guardrail.
The system defined colour as styles, not tokens, which means it names a colour but never says where that colour is allowed to go. LPL’s brand brown passes AA as body text and fails AAA. Fine everywhere it had already been checked. But 22 new pages means colour combinations nobody has made before, and nothing in the file warns you. So I checked every new pairing myself against AA, all of it inside the brand palette. That gap is the thing the design system work later closed properly.
Names had to survive being said out loud.
One I flagged was a page called “Finding an Advisor.” The same menu already had a “Find an Advisor” button in it, which I rebuilt as mentioned earlier, pointing somewhere completely different. Two near-identical names sitting inches apart, going to different places. It got renamed to Working with an Advisor, and if you look at that URL you can still see the old name sitting in the slug.
№09
The Impact
November and December were spent finding out whether any of it worked.
≈3×
TRAFFIC TO THE 2 ORIGINAL PAGES, ROUGHLY TRIPLED
Both had been rebuilt from scratch, and then 20 pages went up around them feeding traffic in. This is the combined effect of both, not one or the other.
Advisors reported converting considerably more investors into clients.
The one that actually matters to the business. Investors turned up to a first conversation already understanding what LPL does, so advisors could spend that meeting on the person instead of explaining the firm.
ALSO
Session duration rose meaningfully
Investors started finding things without asking
Advisors sent links instead of writing explanations
Advisors used the pages themselves to stay current
HOW WE KNOW
≈100
RELEVANT SURVEY RESPONSES
5–6
ADVISOR INTERVIEWS
Analytics for the traffic and duration numbers. A post launch survey with around 100 relevant responses. Then interviews with 5 to 6 advisors, because a survey tells you what changed and a conversation tells you why.
All of it advisor-reported except the analytics, which is the same limitation we started with. Exact figures are client confidential, so what I can share is directional.
None of it needed anything new.
No new components, no new technology, no budget for custom work. 22 pages built from parts that already existed, named in words people actually use.
№10
What I would do differently
01
A design system tells you what was designed, not what was built.
That should have been the process from day one instead of something I learned by wasting a week of the creative team’s time.
02
Test the names, not just the layouts.
Show 5 people a list of nav labels and ask what they expect behind each one. An afternoon of work that would have saved us all of October.
03
Learn the build system sooner.
Teaching myself AEM was the highest leverage thing I did here, and I only got to it once pages were already live.
04
I thought the hard part would be organizing 22 pages. It was what we called them.
The layouts held up because we hardened them against AEM before anyone reviewed them. The names held up because we went back and fixed them.
Thanks for scrolling all the way here :)