Portfolio site - Designing new personalization features

Designing new personalization features

I helped increase app engagement with a new personalization model and feature set.

Background

NerdWallet’s mission is “to provide the tools, information, and insight people need to navigate all of life's financial decisions.”

In service of this mission, NerdWallet developed a personal finance app. It enabled users to track all their accounts in one place, monitor their credit, research financial products, and more.

Problem

The app also offered tips and recommendations tailored to users, but they were very limited. This was due to its inability to recognize certain types of information and action on them.

For example, when a user linked an account the app couldn’t identify the account type or product name. In order to provide meaningful insights and personalized product recommendations, the app would first need to understand which products users had.

Solution

We decided to build features that would enable users to identify and manage the financial products in their wallet — starting with credit cards. If the project was successful, we’d scale the capabilities to other types of products.

Project goal:

Encourage 15% of active users to identify their credit cards within 30 days of launch

Design goals:

Make it seamless for users to report their credit cards across various app touchpoints and scenarios
Integrate new patterns into existing product cards, screens, and user flows
Design a new “wallet” feature for managing products once they’re identified

Approach

Define

Audited the app to understand the system-level needs and impact
Helped determine product requirements and future feature iterations

Frame

Analyzed competitor experiences to get a sense of users’ mental models
Reviewed personalization messaging in the existing flows to ensure consistent tone and language
Pinpointed missing states and user scenario gaps, then recommended solutions

Ideate

Partnered with product designers to conceptualize new flows and actions, as well as their fit within the app’s ecosystem
Collaborated with UXR to confirm my content strategy would resonate with app users
Mapped touchpoints against early content drafts to verify the strategy would support different scenarios
Modeled content and experimented with patterns to help us finalize concepts

Execute

Designed content for:

New flows, modules, settings, and messaging scenarios
Existing flows and product cards

Cocreated new types of app interactions and settings
Collaborated with customer support to ensure consistent language inside and outside the app

Impact

19%

Of active users claimed their cards within 30 days

+7%

Increase in app engagement

Next steps

Not only did we surpass our project goal, but we observed a significant uptick (7%) in app engagement from users who ID’d their credit cards. Because of the project's success, the app team planned to scale the features to other financial products.

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