Helping people reduce their debt faster: a Product Design case study
As you may have heard, times are currently tough for a lot of people, with many having to stretch their finances more than ever before. At TotallyMoney we’re on a mission to help people move their finances forward. In line with that mission we have recently been working on a project that focuses on helping our users reduce the cost of their debt. With this, we’re hoping we can have a positive impact on people’s financial situation during the cost of living crisis and beyond.
I’m a Product Designer at TotallyMoney, and together with my team, we have pushed this feature live to those of our users that could benefit the most from it. In this post I’ll tell you about the design process and work that went on behind the scenes.
Problem and opportunity
At TotallyMoney we like to make informed decisions by utilising both quantitative and qualitative data, so by looking at our existing data as a starting point, we identified an opportunity to help our customers save on interest payments.
From previous user research we found a customer need to reduce debt and cost of debt. We could also back up that same need with our own data, which suggested many people are paying interest on their debt when they don’t have to — as they could be eligible for better credit offers. Based on that, we decided to explore how we could effectively highlight balance transfer cards and debt consolidation loans (often cheaper forms of credit) to those that could benefit from it, while simultaneously considering business objectives.
The Process
Kick off and ideation workshops
To start the project, I got our cross functional team together to discuss any initial questions, as well as risks and dependencies related to the project. Together we reviewed what we already had, and identified opportunities.
Following the kick off, I facilitated an ideation workshop (Crazy 8 style) within the mission to get all initial ideas out. With a very broad scope to begin with, the focus was: ‘How might we motivate users to take action when they could reduce their debt?’
User interviews
Although we had an abundance of good initial ideas at this point, I wanted to better understand why customers that could benefit from taking up better credit offers, don’t act on the opportunity to do so. Hence, I decided to speak to users who:
- Hold debt they pay interest on
- Are eligible for better credit offers
- Haven’t recently acted on the opportunity to reduce cost of credit repayments
I conducted moderated interviews with five participants focusing on research questions around:
- How they manage their current debt and repayments
- How much they understand about different credit options
- What (if anything) has stopped them from taking out an offer that could reduce the cost of their debt repayments
To make sense of all the findings I used affinity mapping to identify themes and understand our users’ situations. One of our main findings were:
Although users are aware of options such as Balance transfer cards and Debt consolidation loans, they still feel unsure of their options and how they work.
Competitor research
In addition to the interviews I completed competitor research to find:
- What others are doing (if anything) in this space
- Strengths and weaknesses
- Opportunities and inspiration
Concept exploration and prioritisation of concepts
To solve the identified customer pain points, I conducted plenty of simple sketching concept exploration. The concepts varied from bringing in customer testimonials or reviews, to highlighting specific offers based on customers data.
This was then followed by assumption mapping and concept prioritisation to find the most effective way of tackling the problems, while balancing potential business impact.
The concepts we decided to focus on were
- User intent & activity (utilise what we know about our users: what they do, have done or might do in the future)
- Guiding / helpful content (while balancing the fine line of avoiding financial advice).
More workshopping
Once we knew what concepts we wanted to further explore, we ran a second ideation workshop.
Lots of great ideas came out of the workshop, and we prioritised them based on what we wanted to do short-, mid- and long term.
Further design exploration
I then went on to further explore and refine the prioritised ideas from the workshop, which leads me to where we are today…
The MLP (Minimum Lovable Product)
For the first iteration, we added an entry point on the home page, testing two different positions. This entry point would take you to a new page with educational content, where we are highlighting bite sized information in the form of benefits and considerations for balance transfer cards and debt consolidation loans.
This was only shown to users who hold a credit balance. The reason being, users who pay interest on their debt could instantly benefit from switching to a different credit deal, and others who currently don’t pay interest, may do so in the future.
AB test
Working closely with my PM and Data analyst, we set several KPIs and guardrail metrics for this test. We set metrics for short and long term impact — for both feature performance and customer impact.
The short term metrics showed that:
- The proportion of users clicking through via the home page entry point was very low, with one variation performing slightly better than the other.
- Neither variation had any statistically significant impact on other home page interactions.
- Although it was a struggle getting users to the educational page, ~50% of users that went to the page proceeded to click the CTA to see credit offers.
The above suggests our challenge is now to get more customers into the entry point to discover the educational content, which will be a focus for future iterations.
Even though we didn’t reach the numbers we had hoped for, we considered it a successful first iteration and it was pushed live for all users in the target group.
Some final words
Overall this project to date has been a good start to introduce more educational content on our platform, and test and validate a new concept. The project will slot in nicely with other upcoming work in the future that could have a continuous positive impact on our customers and the business.
This was a very collaborative project, so I would like to conclude by highlighting all the phenomenal work and feedback from my talented colleagues; specifically, product manager, engineers, legal & compliance, copy writer, data analyst, CRM, commercial and other designers. It’s all these people that help TotallyMoney continue pushing our mission forward.
