Nerdwallet: Digital Product Design
Nerdwallet is an online personal finance company that helps people make better financial decisions. During my time as an intern, I worked to improve the shopping experience for the banking vertical.
Project:
As a design intern at Nerdwallet I worked to improve the overall shopping experience for customers searching for a new bank account.
Role:
Research, design, and user-testing.
Results:
Created designs for a banking comparison page and user-tested designs on 8 users actively searching for a new bank account.
Step 1: Goals and Process
Goal:
make the experience of choosing a savings account better for the user and increase conversion
Success metrics:
clicks and conversion, quality of results, engagement with page, ease of use
User Profile:
~60% surveyed have switched bank accounts
Main factors for people to switch banks: Quality of banking experience (overdraft fees, poor customer service, and maintenance fees). 2nd level Drivers: life change (moving, marriage, new job)
Competitive Research:
I looked at other ways to shop on Nerdwallet and on similar financial websites (My Bank Tracker, Credio, Credit Karma) and shopping sites (Zillow, Kayak) and established themes among them. I explored ideas around new filtering (recommended, best APY rates, "best joint account"), categorizing, search features, and adding the ability to switch bank accounts to the timeline. This ideation and research phase led me to the conclusion that a compare banks tool would be the most immediate and necessary new addition to the page.
Step 2: Designs
Below is a video of my active prototype for the comparison tool. The comparison button pops up after user selects 2 banks to compare. Comparison page design is similar to compare credit cards page, but differs in content.
Step 3: User Testing
We ran qualitative usertesting.com tests on 8 participants in the US actively looking for a new bank account and who had not visited Nerdwallet.com before.
Research Goals:
Investigate if the compare tool allows for users to make a more informed decision
Understand relative strength and weakness of old and new design
Better understand if the information we showed on the results page matched user expectations and needs
Findings:
Overall increase in Confidence rating to choose a bank account
Confidence to choose a bank grew with exposure to compare page design
The results showed an overall increase in confidence to choose a new bank after using the compare tool. The main deciding factor for users choosing an account were star rating and user reviews. There was also an over-emphasis on pros/cons of banks which led me to rework this section.
Final Takeaways
I enjoyed working on the full design timeline for this project (research, ideation, design, prototyping, and testing). I learned how to correctly build a prototype and how to do usability research for my designs. I found the hardest part of the process to be the initial stage where I had to identify which part of the shopping experience to focus on.