HOMEPAGE WIDGETS

Presenting users with timely and pertinent information regarding their financial accounts, empowering them to swiftly take action when managing their finances.

DESCRIPTION

Building financial account snapshots with quick actions to make managing your financial accounts inside of the Oportun app quick and seamless.

CONTEXT

The existing information architecture (iA) failed to meet the needs of our users. Following a recent redesign, product components were compartmentalized into silos to expedite market delivery, overlooking the plethora of user data accumulated before Oportun acquired Digit. Because of this, everyday actions became buried within sub-pages, and crucial features familiar to our users were omitted from the application.

ROLE

Lead Product Designer

TOOLS

Pencil, Paper, Figma, Figjam, Miro, Jira, Monday, Confluence

TIMELINE

Q1 2021

INTRO

Our users were struggling to find important information about their accounts and their statuses. This led to a decreased sentiment toward their app membership and was beginning to lead to a significant decrease in retention metrics.

THE PROBLEM

Earlier in the year, the Oportun app went through an enormous redesign. Oportun acquired Digit, and the name of the app changed. Alongside the rebrand, was also a redesign of the app and our product offerings.

Our business goals were to bring back our retention rate and member lifetime rate to what those numbers were historically and to improve new 30 - 90 day retention of our users.

GOALS

Increase baseline metrics for SAVE, Loan, and Credit Card products.
Move away from "feature ads" to contextual prompts for users to learn and adopt new features.
Create spaces for financial insights.
Create a baseline for future iterations.

WHAT WE KNEW

For the first 10 years that Digit was a service before the 2021 Oportun acquisition, they were a company who offered assistance to their users by connecting to their bank accounts and helping them save for future goals. This was the mental model that our users had grown accustomed to. Post-acquisition, the app was rebranded as a savings account that now came with a $5 subscription fee.

The data showed a high level of churn that our users had been experiencing for some time. We started to see a large disparity in our referral numbers as well as our app store ratings.

A heuristic evaluation of the app showed where we needed to fill the gaps. We had a lack of showing users system status and we had some of our most important actions buried within sub-pages.

CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES

Resistance from Executive Leadership

After being named the leading savings app of 2023 by Bankrate and several other platforms, Executive Leadership believed that there was no need need for alteration.

Uniformity Across Product Teams

The product area was wholly owned by the stakeholders, not the designers, and ultimately ther had the final say on whether or not a feature would be shipped.

HYPOTHESIS

Introducing product actions to the app would increase savings, loan payoff rate, and other core product actions would also rebuild trust with long-term members.
Increasing and improving our just-in-time system statuses would help us retain new members because they would now be able to see success sooner.
By moving core actions to the homepage, we could begin to build it into a financial insights hubthat we could then use to activate users into new product offerings.

THE PROCESS

Testing & Evaluation

To begin, we started off with a pretty straightforward A/B test. After meeting with the Loans team stakeholders, my team and I were able to convince them to funnel a percentage of their web traffic directly to a page where users could pay their loans, as well as set up auto-pay, which also provided relevant loan information.

The test was a quick win!

We saw that our users were 2-3x more likely to set up auto-pay, or pay their bill on time then when compared with having this information only displayed on the home screen.

Getting Project Buy-In

A large portion of the project was selling and reselling this project across the company to a wide-range of stakeholders. By collaborating with designers, devs, and PMs, we were quickly able to grow the majority of product members advocating for the launch of this product.

RESULTS

Reduced the time it took to set up bill pay by 90% which ultimately increased the amount of bills users had set up for auto payment.
Increase the amount of users who had autopay set up for their loans by 37% which resulted in a 16% increase in loans paid on time.