Squirrel Financial Wellbeing App

Project 5 - Week 8, 9 & 10 UXDi Course - General Assembly London

The Brief

Squirrel helps people put structure around their spending so they can save, budget, spend efficiently and pay off debt. We were tasked to design the experience people have when withdrawing money prematurely from their savings goal, prompt them to consider the consequences of their actions, encourage them to stay on track and motivate them to save. Thus reduce the burden of manually paying out people's money. Squirrel requested that we should consider behavioural economics in our solution.

TEAM

Jon Dawson, Katinka van Driel, Nimisha Soni & Elise Goldin.

DURATION: 2 WEEKS

METHODS AND SKILLS USED DURING THE PROJECT

User interviews, concept mapping, user flows, page flows, sketching, paper prototyping, testing, presenting. Mood boards, word association, sketching, personality matrix, Goldilocks statements, brand personality framework, desirability testing, paper prototyping, user testing, presenting. Generation of a questionnaire to test design objectives.

TOOLS USED

User interviews, User research, Competitor analysis, Feature prioritisation, Concept mapping, Storyboarding, User flows, User journeys, Design studio,  Wireframes, Prototyping, User testing, Invision, Marvel, Omnigraffle, Sketch, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Capture, Keynote, Pen and paper

The Process

Discovery Phase

Behavioural Economics

Behavioural economics is the psychology around people’s money habits. From looking at reading materials supplied by the client I was able to pinpoint these key behaviours:

Nudging - Which is to prompt or guide someone to take a particular course of action over a different course of action.

Present Bias and Time Discounting - This is where people prefer short term payoffs, unable to give distant future payoffs the same importance as they find it difficult to imagine their future selves.

Partitioning - By dividing a large quantity into small pieces to create decision points - Like individually wrapped chocolates as opposed to eating a whole bar.

We then reviewed the client’s current app, website, brand assets and with this information we posted on some social media sites a simple survey in order to recruit user interview candidates. In pairs the following day we conducted user interviews.

Key insights from interviews

Tone of voice
We tried to discover was actually what style of feedback to people respond to. For example, is it tough love, gentle prodding, or both. We found out that overall they responded well to a gentle, encouraging and positive tone of voice. However, as money is a serious subject, people added that they respond better to a more direct tone of voice when the consequences are greater.

Small wins  
The majority of people interviewed feel they respond more positively to incremental achievements as opposed to one big pay off. This is because it helps them stay motivated and helps them to get back on track if they falter.

“When I trained for the marathon, thinking about being ready for it overwhelmed me. So I set myself a goal each week, like 5k’s, 10k’s, PB’s etc. which were less intimidating”

Saving when only necessary  
From the people we interviewed, those who did not save as a part of their routine were able to do so when it was absolutely essential, thus avoiding possible dire consequences.

Tracking spending and visual representation
People feel that seeing their spending visually in front of them helps them budget for the following months as they can visualise where they need to cut down.

Competitor Analysis

There is no direct identical competitor to Squirrel in the UK. From this we focused our competitor analysis on tone of voice and nudging.  From research and user interviews it became apparent there are many apps people use to help motivate, encourage and provide feedback that really helped them meet their goals whether it was to help someone lose weight, practice meditation or to help people to stop smoking; these apps were also included in our analysis.

Personas

From all the information gained we created three personas to represent Squirrel's key users benefiting from our new features.

Nancy.  The spontaneous spender.  She’s impulsive, and lives in the moment. The centre of her social circle, but doesn’t want to compromise on her experiences but wants to structure her indulgences.

Guy.  The hand to mouth spender.   Gets carried away with spending, often indulging on music related technology.  He has never had a long term plan or savings.  He feels his perspective has to change as he is getting to an age where he’s starting to think about the future.

Sally.  The advice seeker. Sally is our primary persona. We chose sally because she is currently the user who would be most receptive to advice and would benefit from building better financial habits.

Sally’s pain points.

• Sally doesn’t currently have a regular routine of saving and finds that if she goes off track it takes her a while to get back on track.

• She recently started looking into creating better saving habits.

• She doesn’t like diving into a situation without seeking advice and looks for trust and authority when making a decision.

From these insights I drew a storyboard for Sally using a scenario we'd created for her.

Reframing the brief

From our insights we discovered that in order to discourage people from withdrawing their money prematurely we needed to motivate and encourage them to stay on track before they get into the withdrawal flow, so we would also need to assess and re-design the individual savings pot page.

Hypothesis

By designing a withdrawal flow, and the way people create and modify their saving pots, we will help people make conscious decisions regarding their finances and encourage them to stay on track with their saving goals.

We will know this to be true when the burden to customer support is reduced and there is an increase to the number of goals completed and money saved.

Design Phase

Design Workshop

We began the design phase by sharing our findings with our friends at Squirrel, and holding a two hour workshop to explore ideas for two screens at the centre of the withdrawal flow. 

The first task was to come up with ideas of how to ‘Nudge’ Sally when she tries to withdraw money from a goal before it’s completed.
The second task was to bring together ideas of ways to motivate Sally to get back on track of a savings goal.

We had lots of great ideas come from the design workshop; particularly with regards to visual triggers and metaphors that would encourage Sally to consider the consequences of withdrawing money prematurely.

We needed to test these visual metaphors to ensure that they aligned with our user insights.

Design, Test, Iterate, & Repeat

Over the course of the design phase we managed to create and test seven prototypes with users. The first two were rapid prototypes on paper and scanned into invision, then mid fidelity wireframes, and finally into high fidelity. Here are a couple of the key areas our research and development focused on:

The withdraw button

A suggestion made during the design workshop was to hide the ‘withdraw’ button within the edit menu. On testing people felt like we were purposefully hiding their money from them, and in one case a user felt frustrated to the point that it became a ‘challenge’ for them to withdraw their money - Which of course is counter-productive for us. Further research concluded that the purpose of ‘edit menu’ for users would be only to adjust or amend the content of that page.  We also looked at the content hierarchy and decided that we wanted encouraging features at the top of the screen and the discouraging features much lower down. 

Tone of voice

To ascertain the success of each prototype we set scenarios for our users to work through, requiring them to demonstrate how they would perform those tasks using the app.  We asked the users to tell us what they were thinking and feeling during this process.

Original prototypes used a more ‘firm’ tone asking users why they needed to withdraw, and to confirm their withdrawal. These nudges were perceived as more judgmental and misleading.  Users felt like having to confirm so often became repetitive and nudging soon became nagging.  To address this we tried more helpful and understanding nudges offering suggestions and a way to get back on track.  Our intention was to be encouraging and helpful, without being patronising. And we received some great feedback.

Presenting the Design

At the end of the two week sprint we showed our findings, solution, process, competitor analysis, personas and final designs to the team at Squirrel in a half-hour presentation.
Finally we supplied Squirrel with a full design specification document and our high fidelity prototype designs.

Next steps

Challenges

The user interviews and the second wave of competitor analysis got our team thinking about games or challenges that might encourage people to save, and to reward the ‘small wins’ of saving outside of a set goal.  The idea of challenges would be to start the process of creating a good savings habits. Users would immediately start to see progress and get instant and consistant gratification. We managed to develop the idea but didn’t get the chance to test it.

Notifications

This was another idea we touched upon during the design workshop.  During the discovery phase people mentioned how reminders or notifications of their progress helped to keep their goal fresh in their mind. Presently most Squirrel users only log into their accounts at the end of the month when they get paid. The notification feature will remind users of their saving achievements to keep them motivated.

Sub-goals

During the design workshop we explored the idea of having ‘sub goals’ within the saving screen. Based on user insights this would further motivate users to keep on track allowing them to see their progress and put their achievements into perspective. The idea would be to celebrate saving the smaller increments when working toward the bigger goals.