Helping our customers improve their eligibility for Credit: Reflections from a Product Designer

I joined TotallyMoney in the last week of 2020, the year which I’m sure none of us will ever forget! I had spent just over 4 years working as part of the Tech Design team at one of the Big 4 Consultancy Firms and was looking for a new challenge.

After a few years of working in an environment where I got to experience both external client and internal company projects, I was excited about the prospect of joining an in-house Design team. On reflection, I realised that my favourite projects were long-term which allowed for focus and the chance to dive into a problem area. I appreciated the experience of working with different clients in a range of industries because of how varied it was. However, I now wanted the opportunity to not only solve problems for everyday users but also have the chance to gather learnings and continue to iterate on the product experience!

New beginnings

So after joining TotallyMoney, you can imagine how excited (and also nervous!) I was to be presented with an interesting problem area relating to customers’ ineligibility for Credit.

We give users free access to their Credit Report so that they can take control of their finances. We also provide our users with access to a range of credit products such as Credit Cards, Loans and Car Insurance.

We have thousands of customers using our product every day to search for the right credit card or loan for them. Some of our customers were unable to see any suitable credit options, as they didn’t meet the criteria set by lenders. The journey left them frustrated, as they hadn’t found what they were looking for, and we didn’t offer any reasons why.

A new data model, created in-house, gave us a great opportunity to share information about what was holding a customer back, with those who needed it the most. We wanted to help customers increase their chances of being accepted for the credit cards and loans which they want in the future. It can often be a long journey and we aim to help them along the way.

Here are the top 3 things that I learned on this project from the new experience of moving in-house as a Product Designer:

1. Nothing beats a good old conversation with your customers 💬 — you will always learn new things about them
2. Teamwork makes the dream work! ✨— gathering different perspectives early on helps to create a well-rounded solution
3. There’s no such thing as “Done” ✅ — after shipping there are often many opportunities to learn and adapt experiences for your users

Nothing beats a good old conversation with your customers

Using our new Customer Panel, we were able to directly contact our customers who were experiencing the problem with ineligibility and invite them to take part in the research. I found the idea of talking to customers nerve-wracking (as I hadn’t had the chance to do that many times before!) but, I was looking forward to having the opportunity to learn about the lives of our customers and what their experience was like.

We spoke to 5 of our customers in a moderated user interview where we split the interview into 2 sections. The first part dived into their current circumstances — what their credit score was at the moment and the journey they had been on up until that point. The second part of the interview was a usability test where we asked them to go through the journey in the product and share their thoughts on whether they knew why they were ineligible as a benchmark for our current experience.

Part of our interview script

Having the chance to have these face-to-face (well zoom-to-zoom!) conversations taught me to be flexible based on the customer’s response, as it allowed me to learn more about them and their situation. My biggest learning was accepting that sometimes scripts don’t always go to plan and that’s okay! Adapting the questions and seeing the interview as a casual conversation helped me gain better insights.

Some of the things we found out about our users were:

• Many got into financial difficulties (missing payments and getting into debt) due to past decisions
• Some relied heavily on credit when they were younger as they didn’t have access to information about the impact
• Now online resources plus friends and family were dependable and trustworthy sources of knowledge

Teamwork makes the dream work!

My experience in the past of working in the consultancy consisted of working closely together in project teams to create well-rounded solutions, but due to project constraints, and working with different clients the level of visibility with other teams was at times limited.

I found the experience of moving in-house a big contrast as everyone in the business is contributing to a shared vision, so this made it easier to work with a wider range of teams outside of our squads including Compliance, Product Marketing, and Customer Operations to name but a few!

The benefits of this cross-functional set-up were that:

• It helped us lean on each other and share learnings with the wider team as the research we did also helped fill in knowledge gaps we all had on our customers
• Having collaborative sessions early on was really valuable in drawing out people’s knowledge and experiences from different parts of the business. This gave us varied perspectives to set the foundations for a well-rounded solution
• It supported us to create visibility of design work. I learnt that each time we shared an update less context was required as people were already involved

One of the group’s ideas from the Ideation session

There’s no such thing as “Done”

By the time we were getting towards the end of the project, I had a concept with several parts to it. To help us maximise learning with the smallest amount of effort I alongside a Lead Product Designer and Product Manager distilled the idea down into an MVP or SLC (Simple Loveable Complete) solution.

Some exploration of the entry points and the feature itself

We launched a scaled-back (but in our eyes) complete experience on our app with only one way to get to the feature — through our home screen. A key thing for us was making sure that people who needed it the most were able to use it so we decided to focus on making this accessible to people who had at least one thing which was negatively impacting their eligibility for credit.

the SLC version we launched with

In my past consulting experience once we had finished working on a project the deliverables were then handed back to the client and we didn’t often get access to the results. I often wondered what (if any) the impact of the designs was on the users. To contrast for this project after the launch of this feature we monitored the performance by keeping an eye on the data. I learnt that having access to tailored data is a powerful resource to help inform our design decisions.

Since its launch, we have made several enhancements including:

• Adding additional entry points to key journeys
• Adapting the content and messaging of the entry points (we learnt that personalisation works well!)
• Adding in the factors which are helping someone’s eligibility
• Making it available to all of our customers with a credit report

To get us to this stage I learnt that using assumptions and hypotheses can help with experiments and A/B tests to keep developing the solution. It can sometimes be difficult to keep optimising an experience due to changing business priorities so I was also really grateful that this feature remained a priority for my squad.

Current experience

What’s next

You can find the feature in the app now! It is currently being used by over 60% of our customer base and keep watching this space as the team are currently working on a bigger revamp to the area! 🚀