WageGoal

Innovation for the financially underserved

The Vision

Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners is a nonprofit that provides B2B financial services to clients. The services are face-to-face financial counseling to employees.

Our team’s goal was to scale the counseling services on a digital platform.

The Problem

Full-time employed workers living paycheck to paycheck often make enough money to afford all their bills and living expenses, but their paydays don’t correspond to when their bills are due. They land themselves into debt when they use a credit card or a predatory loan to pay bills before their paychecks arrive.

The Solution

WageGoal tells you if and when your bank balance will hit $0 before a bill is due and enables you to withdraw your paycheck early to afford the bill. WageGoal also analyzes your rate of spending and guides you on how to avoid debt in the future.

What I Did

I was the lead designer on WageGoal. I worked in a cross-functional team of 2 designers, 5 engineers and 2 product managers. I was in charge of the user experience, user research, interaction design, visual design, branding and front-end code.

• Introduced and led Design Sprints to unpack problems and decide on solutions, retrospectives to evaluate how the team might work better together and higher level vision exercises like road mapping and Service Blueprinting.
• Led user research and leveraged a variety of techniques to learn from employees, employers, financial counselors and stakeholders.
• Wrote all the front-end code in Ruby on Rails and Foundation.
• Developed the hiring guide for designers.
• Conducted branding activities including a user-validated naming experiment.

The Outcomes

• Earned employer partnerships with two companies and onboarded ~30 employees to the platform.
• Instilled Agile and Lean mindsets amongst Neighborhood Trust and fostered adoption of Sprint Plannings, Reviews, Retros and hypothesis-driven development.
• Made 3 in-house hires (1 designer, 1 developer, 1 product manager) at Neighborhood Trust to kick start the product team.

User Insights

Kill the data viz. Numerous rounds of user testing told us that, while finance nerds love to see, visualize, and crunch numbers, numbers do not help people make better financial decisions. We discovered that simple, plain-word recommendations and calls to action were much better understood by our target users.

People know their own finances. Even though our users had trouble paying off their bills, they were well aware of how much the bills were and when they were due. Early prototypes concentrated on ways to help people remember what their bills were, but this proved unnecessary.

People have different strategies to pay their bills. Our product made a key assumption: people try to pay their bills on the date they were due. We eventually uncovered another bill paying behavior: those that pay their bills as a lump sum on payday. This invalidated the key assumption for this group and rendered our solution for them ineffective.

Learn More

You won’t believe what happened when we built and iterated on one feature for a whole year! Hint: it’s a lesson learned in managing user feedback and stakeholders. Read it here.