Project Details
Role
Lead Product Designer
Tools
Figma
User Interviews
Type
Growth Design
Duration
2 months
Overview
Accrue Savings is a first-of-its-kind savings platform that incentivizes you to Save now, Buy later. Brands will contribute to your savings when you select them as saving partners, incentivizing you to save first and delay purchases.
Problem
Only 5% of those who signed up were setting aside money towards their savings, a rate that was below our business goal of 15%. This was due to limited savings options and a complicated value prop that was not easy to understand leading to a lower conversion rate.
Solution
Introduce a new savings mechanism that makes saving feel achievable and effortless for our users while improving value prop in the upper funnel that motivates users to fund.
Design
Introducing Round-ups
An effortless way to save spare change where small contributions lead to big savings.
Background
How were people saving currently?
In our first MVP users had 3 ways to save up:
1) One-time deposits
2) Recurring deposits
3) Crowdfunds (friends & family can pitch in towards your savings)
Problem
1. Limited saving options and confusion around earning rewards was leading to low funding rates.
A pattern started emerging where it was clear people weren’t understanding the value prop that saving with Accrue will earn them cash rewards towards the brand they are saving for. Secondly, people mentioned they wished saving to be a lot more effortless.
2. Users weren't fully sure of how this works due to tooltips hiding key information.
Ideate
How might we allow for an effortless saving experience that users would enjoy?
This was a great opportunity to i) introduce a new saving mechanism that felt effortless and ii) beef up our value prop in a strong way and so to kick this off I conducted a brainstorming session with product, marketing and engineering to answer this question
Three potential saving methods emerged as ideas from brainstorming.
1. Payday: save when you get paid
2. Round-ups: save change from purchases
3. Guilty pleasure: save when you shop at a pre-identified merchant (i.e Sephora)
Early iterations of an experience with Round-ups, Payday, and Guilty Pleasure as saving mechanisms.
Define
Ultimately we decided to start with Round-ups as it felt the most effortless.
After technical feasibility was concluded I started imagining the Round-ups experience. There were some complexities involved with Round-ups since we wanted people to choose their monitoring account (where transactions will be monitored from) and the funding account (where the spare change would come from).
Testing
The Round-ups experience got adapted to accommodate common user behavior.
A majority of users expressed that they use credit cards and since Accrue only offers debit card funding and/or bank account (since its a saving product) they felt they would be barely able to save with round-ups.
This made us re-think the funding experience and we decided to add credit card functionality to round-ups which impacted the design.
Design & Prototypes
Introducing the Round-ups experience.
In addition to final designs I also built prototypes in Figma to help demonstrate the look and feel of the designs to engineers.
Entry point & walkthrough
Users are nudged to choose Round-ups as a saving option and are given a walkthrough in a carousel-style design pattern that leads them to choose their round-up amount. I utilized interaction design to help users understand what it means to round-up by certain amounts.
Bringing delight to the Round-ups experience
Users should feel delight and excitement when saving up. I infused in moments of delight during certain typical mundane moments such as transaction processing, confirmation screen, and rate confirmation screen.
Measuring success and what is next.
This was launched at the end of August 2023. The addition of Round-ups drove our funding rate up to 16% which hit our target goal and users have reported feeling they can save up more effortlessly with Round-ups.
Once this experience matures we plan to introduce Payday as the next saving mechanism for our users.
