Bankrate - Financial Goal-Setting
How might we empower users to take control of their finances and achieve their money goals.
Weddings
Parenthood
Retirement
Home Buying
As the UX Lead, I facilitated a cross-functional Design Sprint and led a team of UX and UI designers to rethink the Bankrate authenticated experience. I worked closely with Product and Engineering teams to define the overall strategic vision for the project, while providing more specific guidance and feedback to the Digital Design team to oversee the creation of a secure, engaging platform that enables users to connect their finances, understand their credit score, and reach their personal financial goals.
Project Goal
Our objective was to create a secure, personalized, and educational experience that would enable us to connect users to the right content and products to achieve their financial goals.
DISCOVERY
We conducted primary and secondary research, held stakeholder interviews, and completed empathy mapping exercises to set a solid foundation for our solutioning.
IDEATION
I led a series of sketching exercises to help visualize our solutions. We started with broad, shallow exercises like Crazy 8s, and eventually ended in rounds of sketching/voting on holistic concepts.
Throughout the Design Sprint, we made sure the cross-functional group stayed closely aligned. We shared new information proactively, and aligned on a solution for testing.
Life Stages
One insight that grounded our sprint work was the statistic that 80% of financial decisions are made around five key life stages: starting your career, getting married, buying a house, starting a family, and retirement. We used these life stages to inform our proto-persona generation and rooted our Empathy Mapping to the needs of people entering in to these stages.
Considerations
We had a few key considerations to keep in mind during our ideation. We needed to preserve the value of the legacy MyBankrate experience, which was credit score monitoring. We also needed to understand the competitive landscape, and make sure we were building something different from applications like Credit Karma, Nerdwallet, and Mint. We believed that our strong, unbiased editorial content was a differentiator, as well as our marketplace of products with true user-first rates and lead flows.
