A financial planning tool


Empowering users with personalized guidance for long-term financial success

Challenge

The goal of the project was to steer Equip, an early-stage FinTech startup, in crafting a long-term product strategy and UX direction for its platform offered through employers.

After secondary and primary research, we found that 55% of employees spend 3 hours of their workweek on their finances, are 3 times more likely to change jobs when experiencing financial stress, and lack the supporting systems to take action. This led to a focus on how we might offer personalized guidance for employees' initial financial steps, aimed at curbing procrastination and ultimately improving financial well-being.


Outcome

A validated new product feature, the Financial Roadmap, to boost retention rates by approximately 20%. This, coupled with a comprehensive long-term product strategy and UX direction in the form of a product and operational roadmap spanning the next 1-3 years, positioning Equip for sustained growth.


Timeline

5 months, equivalent


My role

Served as the lead UX Designer, orchestrating the entire design process from ideation to implementation. My responsibilities included conducting customer research, defining personas, crafting journey maps, designing digital prototypes and user interface design, and developing the product- and operational roadmap, while working closely together with the CEO and CTO.

After validating the concept through user testing, I designed a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) that simulates an individual’s net worth over time. It offers the ability to create different scenarios based on financial decisions and events that could occur.

Process

Bringing qualitative user insights to life

  • Embarking on the project, I immersed myself in uncovering the deep-seated needs of our users following preliminary secondary research. Through extensive interviews and collaborative sessions with 37 users and 6 financial experts, insights were formulated, which were then used to craft a set of personas, each representing a unique facet of our user base, to foster understanding and alignment across the entire team.

  • Additionally, I mapped out detailed user journeys, to trace every step of the end-to-end user experience of the current financial services provided by financial experts. These journeys unveiled the pain points and bottlenecks of the current processes, providing invaluable insights for Equip to focus on.

  • Ultimately, this led me to uncover a substantial demand for personalized guidance, particularly during the early stages of (working towards) financial security during an individual's life

  • Prioritized needs, balancing business priorities (e.g., user interaction-, repeat usage-, retention rate) and different (user) perspectives (i.e. identified through user research).

  • Designed wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity visual design in Figma working with a non-existing design system, for which the first modular components were set up.

  • User tested the two concepts using multiple prototypes and tested the usability of the selected concept (e.g., A/B testing, user flow), resulting in an MVP ready for implementation.

  • Conducted multiple user tests with various interactive prototypes validating the information architecture of the data visualisation (i.e. whether the tables effectively and understandably communicated the relatively complex information and were valuable to the users).

Iteration 1

Providing insight into user’s net worth but concluded that they missed direct feedback about their financial situation.

Iteration 2

Enabling users to experience the impact of life-changing events in real-time and receive immediate feedback but concluded that they felt overwhelmed too.

Iteration 3

Educating them on their financial situation and providing concrete next steps they can act upon, making them feel in control of their financial future.

  • Formulated the product strategy for the upcoming 3 years using a product- and operational roadmap, integrating potential new product features stemming from the conducted customer research.

Final design

Simulating financial decisions

The product feature named the Financial Roadmap enables users to simulate the impact of specific financial decisions (i.e. life events) on the development of their financial situation over time. This allows users to think ahead of their financial future by putting a plan together, making their finances more tangible, and starting to act on it.

Reflection

It should not be a one (wo)men’s job

1.

Recognizing the essential value of collaboration across a cross-functional team, to bounce ideas off when hitting a wall.

2.

Learning about the importance of distinguishing between what users say they need and what they need, and the need for varied validation tests to uncover the usability of the tool (information architecture) and the usefulness of the content (meeting actual user needs).

3.

Ultimately, it's not about creating the perfect, accurate tool; it's about delivering value to your users. Sometimes, this means having to make trade-offs between in the context of business and/or user objectives.