UX/UI • Fintech

Improving Customer Acquisition, Retention & Stickiness

Creating an intuitive, frictionless onboarding and payment experience to support customer registration, increase conversion, and promote stickiness.

Overview

The team and I focused on supporting the institute’s bringing their Online Account Opening feature in-house where customers could apply for new accounts and manage their applications.

Problem
  • Customer Registration
  • In-Application Funding
  • Conversion Rate
  • Design & Dev Relationship
Approach
  • User & Competitor Research
  • Design Thinking Exercises
  • IA Audits, Flow & Journey Maps
Deliverables
  • High Fidelity Screens & Prototypes
  • Research Insights & Recommendations
  • UI Improvements
  • Annotated Design Documentation

User Research

The client was having a large drop-off at the point in the flow when users were asked to create credentials so the bank could register them as a user and support the acquisition.

Goals
  • Improve customer registration
  • Empathize with our customers
  • Increase in application funding
Methods
  • Moderated/Unmoderated testing
  • Surveys
  • User Interviews
Deliverables
  • Comprehensive deck that details our approach, insights, findings, recommendations, and conclusion.
  • Artifacts from each study that shows measurable KPIs and Data that supported our decisions.
Problem

New Customer Registration

The client was having a large drop-off at the point in the flow when users were asked to create credentials so the bank could register them as a user and support the acquisition.

Hypothesis
  • Users are dropping off due to long input forms and poor information architecture
Experiment
  • We conducted an unmoderated usability study with 10 participants of the current screen flow to gather insights on how we could improve customer registration.
Analysis
  • Our synthesis of the test and data showed that users preferred to give a small amount of personal information before creating credentials. This also supported shortening the long personal information form which follows UX best practices.
Solution

Update the Information Architecture

Our testing discovered the forms were too long and having them create credentials in the beginning was confusing. We broke the form out into smaller, digestible chunks and moved to collect their name and email before creating their login credentials.

Problem

In Application Funding

We conducted two usability studies to help us empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and retest. Our first test was to understand any hindrances and/or missing information users wanted to know. Our second test was to validate our insights and findings.

Hypothesis
  • Customers aren’t funding accounts due to a lack of incentives, unclear IA, hierarchy, and poor user experience/usability.
Approach
  • We conducted a design thinking exercise to form a problem statement, extract information from previous research efforts from the client, define technical, legal, and business constraints, share ideas and decide what we wanted to prototype and test.
Research
  • We conducted two unmoderated usability studies with 10 participants in each of the current screen flow to gather insights on how we could support customers funding their accounts to prevent attrition.
Solution

Redesign & Additional Payment Options

We conducted another usability study after implementing updates where it was discovered users wanted more payment options with quicker access to their deposits. Additionally, it was discovered the hierarchy was still unclear in the screen for the method, amount, and which account you were depositing in.

Joint Account Rollout

Joint Account application was a feature the client was looking to add and help expand our product offerings in hopes to attract a new customer segment and promote stickiness.

Challenge
  • Applicants had to agree they were filling out the application separately on the same device. Additionally, we adjusted the IA to accommodate for two applicants going through the process
Research
  • Research efforts included competitive research, mapping out customer journeys, user flows iterations, stakeholder interviews, and design critiques.
Approach
  • We had to gather technical, legal, and business requirements from stakeholders across the organization. Once we had the requirements we conducted research, and explored multiple iterations of journey maps and user flows.
Solution

UI and IA Updates

where we added UI components to the screen informing each user whose turn it is to fill out the information. We also added security modals and leveraged the existing Identity verification method, One-Time Passcode via mobile device, to verify the primary and joint applicants weren’t sharing a phone number and were who they say they are.

Document Upload Redesign

This feature is for customers who were applying for an account but did not pass the backend Anti-Risk Management (ARM) screening and so were put into manual review for their application to be reviewed by a member of their ARM team.

Customers had to provide a variety of proof of identity like date of birth or proof of address or more. The original experience was very crowded with text and file requirements like size, type, and specifications. It also didn’t accommodate the new Joint Account experience in the case where either one or both applicants go into review and need to provide proof of identity.