Moneybox: Financial Goals and Guidance Beta

Background:

Moneybox is a mid-size financial startup, with ~1m customers in the UK. The app allows customers to save, invest, start a pension, and set aside money for a first home.

Moneybox is in the process of exploring an evolution towards allowing customers to view their savings not as individual ‘products’, but as goals designed and framed neatly around them; buying their first home, saving for retirement or for a child’s future university fees.

This strategic shift has emerged slowly, out of user research pointing towards how customers actually save, and plans to combine Moneybox’s deep financial expertise with the company’s human-centred design and product practice.

Project

This project focused on building a live Beta to develop some these ideas, and test some key assumptions around financial goals and guidance. For my part, new journeys, needed creating – specifically, allowing users to create an Emergency Fund goal. Existing features also needed to come together as one central ‘Goals’ system in the app.

My Role:

I was the main Product Designer working to deliver this project, in a small squad with a Product Manager, Engineers, QAs and collaborating closely with Marketing, Compliance, and our Head of Personal Finance.

   Screens for concept testing
 

🧠 Insights from ongoing research leading to the project

The idea to shift away from financial ‘products’ and towards goals and guidance came from collective, repeated insights (ultimately over years) that signalled an opportunity for the business. For example:

  • Many customers were using spreadsheets to track their spending, and savings goals

  • Customers were choosing accounts that weren’t right for their financial goals

  • Customers were seeking advice online and from friends and family, but outcomes were often vague and not always trusted.

  • Customers would leave Moneybox unexpectedly – when reaching a goal external from the platform.

🌟 Concept testing framing this project

As it was seen as a bigger bet, concept testing (above) was carried out before this project by a UX researcher to explore reactions, and understand value for customers. Takeaways from this helped shape the direction of the beta, including:

  • Customers are more than happy to take recommendations, but want to be in the driving seat

  • There is more space and value for customers in long-term goals vs short term

  • Customers deal with financial goals in a ‘sequential’ ways, rather than ‘parallel’

  • Customers are more interested in a projection of the value of their product(s) and suggestions on good value products than the progress of a goal. 

Ultimately, getting feedback on these low-fi ‘extremes’ concepts helped us rule out many ideas to forge a sensible direction.

🚹 Beta testing

After conversations and strategy reviews, it was decided that we would take a version of this into a closed MVP / Beta, to examine how customers responded over time.

Scope of this project

Existing Homebuying guidance

💰 Planning and designing the Emergency Fund Goal

Building up an Emergency Fund (for unexpected large outgoings) is one of the most important steps of personal financial planning and is one of the first thing savers should do with their money. It was chosen as a goal for the Beta for this reason, along with the fact that an accurate savings target can be reached without lots of detailed information.

I worked closely with our Head of Personal Finance, who acts as a knowledge expert on financial guidance, and the Product Manager, running:

  • A workshop with developers to evaluate constraints, opportunities and take on-board ideas.

  • Co-design sessions to map out draft stages of a user journey, working backwards from the minimum needed to give the customer an Emergency fund target, noting down key pieces of advice that needed to be offered at each stage.

👨‍👨‍👧 Decisions made together

With a view to delivering the project as an MVP in Beta, and with limited build time, we examined what we would need, at a minimum to generate a personal ‘Emergency Fund’ goal.

  • Discussions led to the simplification of the journey. We only needed to ask two questions: users’ salary, and if they had existing savings towards an Emergency Fund.

  • Users should be able to amend their Emergency fund target to suit them.

  • We felt that users should have context to base their decision to amend their Emergency Fund target – things rooted in the everyday that would give them a reference point.

✍️ Sketching and low-fi structure

I spent time sketching and working quickly in Figma to generate a cohesive flow, incorporating the requirements, but reformatting it in a way that made narrative sense. These were:

  • A context-setting carousel with digestible information about what an Emergency Fund is, and why it’s important

  • Questions about users’ salary, used to generate the target amount

  • An interactive screen allowing users to tweak/amend their Emergency Fund target

  • A screen where users could choose a weekly amount to contribute, as a proportion of their salary.

✍️ End result after rounds of iteration

⚡️ The design phase of this project was speedy, under 2 weeks, with some time for refinement, and replacing illustrations afterwards. Some initial proposals (e.g. the carousel) didn’t make it into build due to engineering time constraints, so we had to find ways to creatively re-incorporate the information into the journey.

🧪 Without time or buy-in for full usability testing, I ran guerilla testing with colleagues throughout to ensure we had caught any major usability concerns, and made ongoing amends up until handover.

👩🏽‍⚖️ I also worked closely with our legal team to ensure designs were compliant. There can be strict FCA rules around financial guidance, so we had conversations daily to review copy, content and flow logic.

💰 Emergency Fund Goal: Outcome

The full flow was designing and built successfully, using new and existing Moneybox Design System components. It allowed customers to:

  • Set themselves a manageable savings target

  • See contextual information on how it was calculated, and how best to amend it

  • Allocate existing savings towards that goal

  • Set up a new savings account and allocate regular deposits towards that goal

  • Track their progress towards that goal

🎯 Pulling the Goals area together

The broader project scope involved conceiving of and designing a space for the Beta, where users could access their goals, track their progress, and see a breakdown of more complex goals. Work on this included:

  • A ‘Goals’ tab in the app, with a new nav icon. This work also involved working alongside, and briefing our in-house Brand and Creative team for launching the feature with a coherent identity across all channels. It also involved spring cleaning the existing nav bar icons while I was at it.

  • New ‘goal’ widgets that allowed users to track the status of their goals at a glance, made by developing and building on existing DS components.

  • Tracking pages that provided more detailed breakdowns and were the home for goal management, account access, and subsequent account cross-sell.

🧪 Ongoing user research and analytics

Analytics are currently underway to evaluate the Goals beta, looking at conversion, goal completion and deposit amounts of those in the Beta.

I also helped plan and run customer interviews alongside a product manager, speaking to customers who had, and hadn’t set up goals – focusing on why customers were not converting through the homebuying goal, assessing the value of the MVP, and gathering general insights and detailed feedback about the feature.

Interviews with Goals Beta customers

Among many takeaways, some high-level insights were:

  • In Beta, Goals is providing some limited value, but the target amount, progress bar, and initial guidance are seen as the bare minimum. There is an expectation of improvement for the feature to be viable. Customers expect more goals, and new features to be added

  • The Homebuying guidance flow has some sticking points, and aren’t yet flexible enough to accommodate user scenarios. Anecdotally, the people we spoke to all had scenarios that didn’t quite fit with the happy path

  • Users who don’t already have a certain goal are more likely to get value out of goals (in its current form) than users who do have a goal