We’re all ears
How listening to real savers is already helping us evolve and improve Choices.
When we set out to build the future of life savings we said an important part of the process was going to be sharing our thinking and being receptive to external ideas and challenges. Of course, it’s easy to say you’re listening, but always better to demonstrate it.
The role of Choices’ Campfire is to tell the story of how we’re testing and learning. But even Campfire hasn’t been immune to the process.
It began life as ‘Open Kitchen’. But as the choicemaker characters evolved testers said they were struggling to make the connection and the name needed to evolve too, so it did.
Likewise, when the customer insights point to more substantial changes, that’s where we’ll go. And one great example of this is the development of choice-making and priorities in the app.
Don’t let them drown in data
When we first thought about the best way to help savers get their money to better places we looked at what was currently on offer.
Straight away we noticed that there were interesting new technologies that could dissect your finances lots of different ways, and reflect this all back through handy dashboard apps.
But here’s the problem. If you were struggling to choose the best investment option in the first place, you would now just have extra data to pile on top of this, and could be left even more confused.
The comforts of control and context
We realised that it’s not enough to give savers more data, they need to feel informed. And speaking to real savers showed us they don’t want to spend hours thinking about investments, but at the same time they need to see the working and be confident they’re making the right decisions.
This showed that information is about more than numbers, it’s about the right context for personal circumstances. It also demonstrated how people need to know that they’re still in control of their decisions.
This was the foundation of a big part of the idea behind Choices — sifting through data to find the right context for customers and empowering them in their financial decisions.
Puzzles, priorities and a prototype
We had to decide what context customers needed to help them make the right choices. The first part of the puzzle was looking at how we could connect in to people’s bank accounts and find extra amounts of money that could be invested. This is how the technology behind Tracker was introduced. But how to decide what to do with the money that Tracker finds? What information do people need to make their choices?
Our design team put together a prototype experience for these choices giving savers a view of past, present and future saving with previous actions, current contributions and projections of future value. We put this back in front of testers.
We also started to think about how we connect all this data with what’s on savers’ minds. Well, if you want to know what’s on savers’ minds, why not just ask them?
So we introduced the idea of ‘Priorities’, the ability for savers to tell Choices what their most pressing need is. Using this information the app could then pull out how different investment decisions could impact those priorities.
Don’t throw the baby out with the data deluge
As always, we wanted to hone Choices by talking to real savers. When we put these early designs in front of testers, the results were interesting. Just like the initial challenge we were addressing, the problem was too much data to take in.
However, what was clear from all the savers we spoke to was that asking them for their priorities was a really helpful addition. It meant the right information was selected, but they were still in control. This meant that the saver could make a comparative choice, with the most immediate information, not just heaps of confusing data.
With this in mind we redesigned what a choice looks like in the app, stripping out the unnecessary information and putting the saver’s priority front and centre.
Feedback on this new design showed that this helped savers make comparisons they were already trying to work out in their head, such as amount vs. time. All we needed now were some visual tweaks to make sure this comparison was clear.
Testing, testing …
The choice-making and priorities process is just one thing that we have improved by working with real savers. We’re continuing to test different parts of Choices as they are built, and will keep designing new features in response to real customer challenges.
Keep an eye on Campfire for future developments and leave a comment if there’s any new features you’d like to see Choices provide. Sign up to early access here
