WageGoal Back of House
Where to go from a Concierge MVP
The Goal
WageGoal is a web app that alerts you when your bank account is in danger of overdraft. The app lets you withdraw funds from your paycheck before payday to help prevent the overdraft.
It’s a concierge app that my team and I built over a few months, and we needed an admin robust enough to serve our first customers.
The Problem
Our WageGoal admins are responsible for monitoring clients’ financial information and alerting them when it seemed their finances were going off track.
It was very challenging for the admin to do these tasks with her existing methods. She tracked client information on spreadsheets. She copy and pasted messages from documents into chat windows. In addition, sometimes the clients’ information would not load properly, requiring her to deep dive into each client and check that their information was still valid.
It took on average 6 minutes to attend to each customer each day. We thought we could do better.
The Solution
The redesigned WageGoal admin displays all the messages that are scheduled to be sent to users, and enables her to send the messages with a push of a button. We also surfaced questionable bank balance information when we saw it.
What I Did
I led a design sprint with the admin, the product owner, a data analyst and an engineer.
- Established initial goals and success metrics
- Facilitated divergent exercises to come up with unique ideas to solve the problems
- Facilitated convergent exercises to decide on the lowest effort, highest impact solutions
- Prototyped solutions and ran usability testing with the admin
- Led user story generation and prioritization
- Ran OOUX exercises with the engineer to share knowledge on how we’d build out the admin system
- Wrote all front-end code using Foundation and Ruby on Rails
The Outcomes
- Decreased average time admin spent on duties
- Educated team on staying lean and rigorously prioritizing work
Insights
Journeys are key to understanding problems and opportunities. The first day of the design sprint was critical. The team was not aware of how complex admin duties were until we walked through the end to end experience, noting key problems and bottlenecks. This helped us to home in on and stick to goals.
Involve engineers in the early stages. When it comes to working in small teams, handoffs and documentation are a farce. When you involve engineers in the formative stages, you speak the same language early on. Pair designing and pair programming helped build trust and rapport and improved our workflow significantly.
