Building a new Home for Plum

Here at Plum, we don’t sit still. The past year has been non-stop with new products and enhancements to help our customers do more with their money.

As the product evolves, the experience has to remain great across the whole app for all our customers. This means evaluating key parts of the user journey, making improvements, and introducing new and innovative features.

Through talking to our customers, one thing we discussed over and over was the home screen. Our customers told us they expect even better visibility of important information about their finances at-a-glance, including their money movements, savings, and investments.

That’s why we decided to embark on a refresh, aiming to give customers an instant overview of their wealth journey as well as provide an interactive portal to explore more ways to build wealth with Plum.

A home for Plumsters

Plum’s home screen is the heart of the app. It’s a dynamic dashboard that provides users with a comprehensive view of their wealth-building journey.

It brings together savings, investments, and spending as well as showing their overall Plum Value, which is the lifetime amount of money the customer has saved with Plum. It’s the first place customers visit, and the place they return to time and time again whenever they need to reorientate themselves.

We spent weeks discussing the home screen with our customers and found that they expect to be able to track their finances effortlessly and efficiently with Plum, see any changes at a glance, and trust that their money is safe and available with Plum through a dynamic interface.

With accessibility at its centre, the home screen needs to be clear and easy to use, both for established Plumsters and brand new users of the app. Without these things, customers will no longer engage with the app and will miss out on the smart features that help their money do more.

As it forms the first step in most customers’ exploration of the app, the home screen is integrated with every part of the Plum product. This meant the involvement of multiple departments and stakeholders in the project, including Brand, Product Design, CS, and Engineering, to ensure that everyone was working together toward the same goal of creating amazing customer experiences.

So this project was about more than just design: it speaks to the fundamentals of Plum’s mission, to maximise people’s money. Getting it right will mean people are better off, which is ultimately what we all want at Plum.

Preserving the essence

While we wanted to approach the home screen with creativity and imagination, we didn’t want to get rid of any elements that our users had come to rely upon.

In particular, keeping the Plum Value clearly visible, alongside a detailed breakdown of finances were things that we knew our customers would miss. Therefore, we kept the primary location of these crucial elements on the new home screen to ensure our customers could easily and quickly access this information.

Keeping the brand consistent was also really important: as a financial product, we don’t want to alarm our customers by making too many drastic changes that might undermine their trust in us. We decided to use the same colours and iconography to highlight wealth categories in particular, such as pockets, investments, and cards, which offers visual reassurance, particularly for customers who have been using the app for a long time.

Addressing pain points

While there were elements that worked well, there were two main limitations that had arisen due to the fast and organic expansion of the product over time.

Firstly, the home screen didn’t show a full view of customer activity. For example, the Brain function — a key feature of Plum that our customers rave about — was not featured with useful information, so new users weren’t always able to find it or understand how it worked. It also wasn’t always clear where money was at a given time. We felt this needed to be reimagined to ensure customers were getting value straight away from Plum and felt in control of their finances.

Secondly, we wanted to fix the basic usability of the screen. Customers were faced with complex journeys to find their intended destinations, often having to tap multiple times to access quite basic information. As added complexity can damage customer confidence, we were keen to simplify this to make sure users get what they need from Plum as quickly as possible.

Finally, we wanted to look to the future. Not only do customer needs and goals change over time, but the product itself flexes and grows alongside it. So by reimagining the home screen, we wanted to take a more modular approach, with widgets that can be scaled and customised for a more personalised customer experience throughout their wealth-building journey with Plum.

Welcome to the new Plum home screen

For the MVP, we focused on three elements.

The Brain came first. We wanted to highlight the value of the Brain, with the most important information (e.g. next deposit date, current rules set up) displayed first in the widget. Smart nudges for saving tools encourage customers to take their next best action to take control of their finances.

Next, we focused on the Activity feed. We aimed for ultimate clarity with a centralised view of all customer money movements. This includes pending transactions, which are pinned at the top for better visibility, as well as withdrawals and deposits. This gives users a clearer understanding of where their money is at all times.

Then, we tackled the Plum Value itself, which is the Plum proposition in a nutshell. We condensed the wealth overview to make it easier to understand and convenient to take action from. By adding an ‘add money’ key action to the Plum Value, we are making it easier for customers to deposit and save money in seconds with the app.

What’s next

We’re not stopping here! More releases are coming soon that will make the home screen even more intuitive for customers.

One element we’re working on is an investment widget specifically designed for investors who are taking their first steps in their investment journey. We’ve also started on a full exploration of the app’s full information architecture, with exciting developments coming towards the end of 2023.

In the meantime, we’re delighted to hear positive feedback from our early testers. With the help of the new and improved home screen, customers are in an even better place to maximise their money. And this is, after all, why we’re here!

Follow Making Plum on Medium for more insights into what goes into building Plum.