How might we concoct…
a successful financial lifestyle app for middle America of a certain political background.
Ingredients
Stakeholders
A CEO with an idea and a vision to offer high quality financial services including credit card, checking accounts, savings accounts, and insurance policies
Users from the middle of America who do not typically have access to high quality in-person financial services, specifically those with more conservative values
Team
A design team of product managers, branding experts, UX designers, UI designers, and one Lead UX Researcher (me again, surprise)
Products
An app and webapp experience that provides financial services as well as lifestyle and community features and sections
Financial products: Credit Card, Banking Accounts, Insurance Policies, Mortgages, and eventually investment opportunities
From Notepad to Hot Dish
The concept of GloriFi was dreamt up by a group of folks looking to provide first-class financial products and services to their community. The idea was to provide a useful and engaging user experience, while ensuring cutting-edge security.
Primarily, I served as the Lead User Researcher on the design team. I eventually lead as the UX Designer for the “Rewards” and “Community” tabs/features of the app.
Role:
Lead User Researcher/Tester & UX Designer
Gathering Ingredients to Test with Real Users
Folding in UX & User Research
The first order of user testing business was to craft proto-personas as a design team
From there, I leveraged online spaces and UX tools, such as UserTesting to run prototypes against our personas.
I conducted A/B Tests, Usability Tests, Optimization Tests, and Value Tests as well as Card Sorts and Tree Tests
At the same time, I was leading user research efforts by joining as many online groups and spaces of our target users as possible and engaging in discussions to understand the goals, wants, and needs of our target demo
I also spent time exploring other not only other financial apps, but also other apps that were popular among our target demographic
I dispersed large-scale surveys of the target demo to gather feedback about their habits
I even went to spaces and towns where our target demo would spend time to observe them and engage in light-hearted discussions. Places like Bass Pro Shops, Home Depot, etc. in and around Colorado towns that were home to a larger majority of our target users
Serving up the work
Part of the research process always includes documentation and presentation of the findings. I was responsible for reporting out insights about users to stakeholders.
During the process, a big insight was uncovered about financial apps in general — users do not spend time on their financial apps. This lead to the incorporation of a “feed” tab, as well as designing an engaging rewards experience, and roadmapping a community section. Given the changes, I conducted a series of tests and research, and then flew to Dallas to present the results to the CEO and Stakeholders.
UX Design for GloriFi
Loyalty and Rewards tab designs.
When I inherited the Rewards section, it was underwhelming.
I spent time looking back through all of the research and testing that I conducted for answers and inspiration, and gave the section an uplift.
My transformation of the Rewards Tab in the live app.
UX Design for GloriFi
Community space and features design.
Community was designed and roadmapped for the purpose of giving a space where users could engage with more relevant features, and feel like a part of something bigger than finance and bigger than themselves.
The Community space was to be its own tab on the main navigation. I designed all flows and components for each interaction.
Everything we did at GloriFi, we also translated to webapp. I was responsible for all responsive screens for all of my designs.
