Summary
As part of a plan to encourage 1 million customers to start investing digitally, HSBC wanted to design a new app feature that would demystify investing, make it more accessible for UK customers, and inspire them to invest for the first time.
In collaboration with numerous teams at HSBC and another external agency, Zühlke, we leveraged user-centred design to create Pots & Goals: a simple feature that helps users set financial targets, educates them about investing, and encourages them to invest as a way of achieving their goals.
Impact
Between the first and last round of user testing we saw vast improvements in user feedback thanks to design changes we'd made.
Throughout the project I received exceptional praise from the client and project team on everything from my ability to understand and distill complexity to how I prepared designs for compliance reviews.
THE CHALLENGE
Empower 1 million customers to invest digitally
HSBC wanted to enhance its app's functionality and user experience to empower customers to achieve their financial goals and grow their wealth. It aimed to have 1 million customers investing digitally — an objective that extended beyond this project — while aligning both user and business needs.
User needs
Existing HSBC research had led to three key insights that would be crucial to our work:
Business goals
Alongside users’ needs, this project also aligned with several business goals. HSBC wanted to:
“Fund investment is a dark art best left to the professionals.”
We kicked off the project with 90-minute, one-on-one interviews with non-investors and people who had recently started investing. We made several key findings:
Myths create barriers
The most common reasons people don't invest are often myths including: you could lose all of your money (true but less likely than believed), you need to be an expert, you need to be wealthy, you need a large lump sum, and investing locks your money away.
FOMO is a motivator
Investing is now regularly discussed in many social circles. This makes it feel more accessible and creates a fear of missing out for those not yet investing.
People are saving more but let down by interest rates
The pandemic helped to improve people's savings habits but their savings accounts weren’t offering the interest rates they wanted to grow their money.
Research can be paralysing
Many conduct research into investing to weigh up the risks and rewards, and decide if it's for them. However, they're unsure of which sources to trust and constantly feel they need to know more before starting.
Empower, Educate, Encourage
With a better understanding of our users and our business objectives, we set three design goals to help us address them:
users with a simple experience that helps them set and achieve financial goals.
users to debunk myths and help them understand how investing might help to reach their goals.
users to start investing with as little as £1 per month.
Collaborating to create an interactive prototype for testing
In a series of collaborative workshops, we brainstormed the process of settings financial goals and choosing how to contribute towards. This led to the creation of low-fidelity wireframes visualising the user journey.
These ideas were refined and combined into an interactive prototype with input from a UX writer to improve copy. This iterative process helped to bring the concepts to life and shape the prototype for user testing.
“I feel a bit overwhelmed.”
The prototype was tested with seven participants (four with no investing knowledge and three active investors). The idea of setting goals and using investing as a means to achieve them was well-received, but there were some issues with the execution.
Insights
The feature wasn't clearly explained to users, and they weren't told it involved investing, leading to confusion and frustration later on.
Overall, the journey failed to provide timely and relevant information, leaving users feeling uncertain and ill-equipped to make informed decisions.
The information was not suitable for those with no prior investing knowledge, making them likely to drop off soon after investing was mentioned.
Even users with more investing experience felt overwhelmed by the presentation of information. When asked to select an investment fund, they said they were likely to drop off because they lacked sufficient information and hadn’t expected this choice.
Despite the option to opt out of investing and use a savings-only account, users felt that there was excessive pressure to invest, creating a sense of being coerced into making investment choices they were not comfortable with.
Design takeaways
Helping customers to set and achieve financial goals
The designs underwent three more rounds of design iteration and usability testing to refine the final designs. The result is Pots & Goals, a feature that empowers customers to set financial targets, educates them on how they could achieve them, and encourages them to begin investing.
Set financial goals
Research showed that HSBC’s customers have financial goals but aren't sure how to achieve them. Pots & Goals helps them to quickly and easily define what they're saving for, how much they want to save and by when. It then makes it easy for them to understand how much they need to contribute if they wish to achieve it by their target date.
Learn about investing & envision the future
With a goal set, customers are encouraged to learn how investing might help them achieve it. Collaboration with a UX writer helped to dispel myths that hold customers back and provide them the information they need to feel comfortable investing.
We also designed engaging and playful interactions that help users to explore and compare potential outcomes depending on how they split their monthly contributions between investment and savings accounts.
Set up pots
Whether a customer chooses to invest or not, they are then helped to open savings and/or investment accounts that will hold their contributions
Manage your goals
Another part of this project that I designed — but that goes beyond the scope of this case study — was the management of goals once they were created.
Customers can track their progress, be alerted if they’re going to miss their target amount or date, make additional contributions towards their goal, and make any edits to their original goals.
Personal lessons
Identify and engage other teams at the right time
Many technical constraints and other challenges could’ve been discovered and overcome more efficiently if the appropriate teams had been engaged and made aware of our work sooner. When a user has to open an account, for instance, Pots & Goals takes users into existing journeys to which we had to make design changes. This process would have been smoother had we communicated with the relevant team sooner.
Storytelling is a superpower
Effective storytelling was the key to getting stakeholder buy-in on design decisions big and small. Throughout this project I honed and modified the story I told depending on the audience and presentation goals. As such, I learnt presentation and storytelling skills that I've since carried into other projects.
