Modernizing Personal Finance to Increase Feature Adoption
Project Overview
In my role at PNC Bank, I was tasked with modernizing the spending and budgets feature using our new design system. The existing experience was outdated, difficult to use, and misaligned with our new strategic design direction. My goal was to create a new, intuitive interface that would delight customers and help them better manage their finances.
UX & UI Design
Competitive Analysis, Workshop Facilitation, Stakeholder Interviews
Sketch, Invision, Figma
Fintech
Step 1: Understanding what to build
To better understand what to build, I conducted a competitor analysis of the following companies in the market: Mint, Rocket Money, Monarch, Copilot, and NerdWallet. I visually catalogued each experience to better understand the each feature. Its interactions, micro-animations, information hierarchy, and flow.
Analysis Cont.
Secondly, I created an excel document of the full feature list, key product offerings, target audiences, app navigation, and design strengths into a competitor analysis table. I find that both a visual artifact and non-visual artifact speak to business and design stakeholders, resulting in a more productive dialogue.
Step 2: Defining direction
Working with spending and budget stakeholders including colleagues from product, dev, and design, we hypothesized 4 areas to increase engagement and drive value to customers:
Dashboard - aggregating data into a single page
Monthly Cashflow - calculating money in vs money out
Spending - exploring data visualizations
Budgets - increase ease of use for budget creation and management
Step 3: Explorations
Next, I facilitated a workshop to view and evaluate the four concept areas. Using Invision freehand, I discussed the approach for each design and spoke to interactions, animations and flows. Members of product, dev and design then dot voted on their favorite concepts (as seen with 🔥).
Step 4: Hi-Fidelity Design
Next, I created high fidelity prototypes using sketch and Invision to review with key stakeholders and solicit developer feedback.
*Colors and iconography had not yet been finalized
Spending and Budget dashboards
Editing a Budget
Monthly Cashflow
Step 5: Measurement
Finally, I created a measurement plan to test the new experience against the control to ensure we adequately captured the success (or failure) of our hypotheses.
Feature Adoption Rate
- How many active users engage with the new spending and budgeting features at least once a week?
- How many users who engage successfully create budgets
- What categories are most frequently used?
- How many users who engage successfully create budgets
Monthly/Weekly Active Users
- Track the number of unique users who regularly return every week and month
- How does this compare to previous MAU/DAU
Task Success
- What percentage of users successfully create a budget, set spending goals, or review spending analytics and cashflow?
- How does this compare to previous success rates?
Retention
- Track the 30 and 90 day retention rates.
- What percentage of engaged users return to the experience after 1 month? After 3 months?
Support Tickets & App Store Reviews
- Aggregate reviews and support tickets mentioning spending and budgeting features every week to maintain a pulse on negative and positive qualitative feedback
