Project Details
Role
Product Designer collaborating with Product Design, Product and Engineering teams
Tools
Figma
Type
Product Design
Duration
4 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
Out of those who signed up only 10% were setting aside money towards their savings. This was concerning because this meant users weren’t understanding our main value prop which is people earn cash when they save with Accrue.
Solution
Revamp the experience for users to make deposits to save. An opportunity exists for this key experience to clearly convey the rewards they’ll earn and to be simple and delightful as possible for users to set aside their first dollar to save. Saving should be an exciting journey for our users.
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. A lot of key information was hidden behind tooltips which people weren’t viewing leading to confusion of how this works.
Ideate
This was a great opportunity to introduce a new saving mechanism that felt effortless and beef up our value prop in a strong way
We started brainstorming to think of how to save up more effortless way and came up with 3 ideas:
1. Payday: automatically save when you get paid
2. Round-ups: automatically save spare change when purchasing
3. Guilty pleasure: automatically save when you spend at a pre-defined merchant
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 saving experience of them all.
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).
Solution
1. Introducing Round-ups – a way to effortlessly save up your spare change for each purchase you make.
2. At the same time we wanted to revamp the Recurring Deposits experience to be more effortless.
Before: An experience that brought decision fatigue and cognitive overload.
We realized the recurring deposit experience was bringing cognitive overload to users and forcing them to make decisions such as when they’d like to finish saving. This was something a lot of people mentioned they didn’t know early on and caused them to drop off.
After: A simpler experience that aligned to pay schedules to encourage people to set realistic recurring deposit schedules.
We revamped the experience to 1) remove decision fatigue to choose an end date and 2) align with pay schedules as we had heard from people that the current experience was disjoined from the reality that people prefer to save when they get paid.
3. Value prop was revamped in a powerful way that landed well with users.
Interactivity was used to clearly convey the reward amount based on the deposit amount. The reward amount in yellow changes as the deposit amount changes. We also added popular amounts to reduce decision fatigue for the one-time deposit flow.
Other ways your savings show up within the Accrue product.
Measuring success and what is next.
This was launched at the end of August 2023. The improved value prop and addition of Round-ups drove our funding rate up by 19% which is a win so far and users have reported understanding the value prop a lot more clearly.
Once this experience matures we plan to introduce Payday as the next saving mechanism for our users.
Key learnings
1. Show don’t tell
The value prop had to be communicated in a way where too many words would be a hindrance, especially at the saving and funding part of the flow. By using interactivity in a clever way where the user was being shown how much they’d earn in a powerful way we were able to remove the need for too much text.
2. Integrate user behaviors into experiences
The recurring deposit experience had to be overhauled to bring it closer to people’s typical behavior of saving on the day they get paid. By bringing that in we were able to bring that experience closer to reality and make it more effortless.
