NerdWallet app preregistration
NerdWallet aims to provide financial clarity and confidence. The personal finance tracking app is a valuable tool that helps users towards their goals by providing insights into spending habits, cash flow, credit score, and more.
As our teams were scaling up efforts to grow the logged-in experience of the native app while building brand equity, I saw an opportunity to transition our app presentation from being purely functional to one that inspired and better aligned with our brand promise.
Role:
Visual design, brand design, UX, product marketing
Team:
Rahat Kukreja – PM
Hass Lunsford – product design
Liv Combe, Jamie Erlich – content strategy
Chris Ho, Steve Young – eng
Timeline:
6 weeks
The problem space
Part of my role in product marketing was to ensure our app store and preregistration assets were up to date anytime there was a change to the experience, which happened on a frequent basis. I confirmed with the eng team that it was a significant use of their time, and then approached the product pod with this opportunity. We ended up uncovering several key pain points:
Doesn’t connect the dots between the brand, mission, and product
• The current preregistration is purely functional and redundant: we’re not providing any additional insights users haven’t gleaned from the app and play stores
• There’s a disconnect from brand and marketing touch points to preregistration, and it doesn’t reflect our brand values or personality
Overall lift
• Because we’re simply mirroring the app store, preregistration has to be updated each time there’s any change
• Need to future proof
Segmentation data
• There’s opportunity to better position ourselves in a way that appeals to our primary audience
• From preregistration to registration screens, Android had a 19% drop-off and iOS roughly a 17% drop-off
Current preregistration screens
Déjà vu in the App Store and Google Play Store
The solution
We balanced our target audience’s primary goals with a visual story that highlighted our current value props and was succinct enough to engage users to registration.
Goals
We first needed to ground ourselves in the purpose and value of preregistration screens.
Primary goals:
• Create a more relevant and engaging onboarding experience
• Educate on what the app does and how users can achieve their financial goals
• Motivate users to continue using the product
• Bridge brand expression and functionalities to better reflect updated value prop language and the rededesigned member home
Primary benefits:
• Plays a role in deciding if user will use app again or not
• Eases users into our experience and features and shows them why they should use the app
“If you don’t excite them, inject value, and create hooks to re-engage them, they’re going to drop off, uninstall, and get on with their lives.”
Roadmap
This initiative was not part of the pod’s original roadmap, so I created a cadence to bring to the PM and confirm this was feasible for everyone involved. Midway through explorations, we had to reprioritize so I went back to the prereg roadmap and adjusted to ensure we’d still release before the holiday break.
Research
After running a competitive analysis to identify trends and successful aspects, I revisited the financial goals that were most important to our primary audience: investing, retiring, and tracking and improving their finances.
Industry research surfaced some key best practices:
• Start by explaining what the user will gain rather than immediately or only showing all the features at once
• Compact onboarding screens: keep it short and avoid heavy explanations
• Include a skip option
The team hypothesized most people spend an average of 4-5 seconds per screen, and additional research showed attention spans averaged 8 seconds – this was an important piece that shaped the messaging and complexity of visuals.
While there are a number of onboarding approaches, the two with the highest potential for our goals were either feature oriented (focusing on the app’s functionalities) or benefits oriented (highlighting the value to show not how something works, but why they need it).
Tidal example: feature oriented
Evernote example: benefits oriented
Concepts
After running a competitive analysis to identify trends and successful aspects, I revisited the financial goals that were most important to our primary audience: investing, retiring, ]tracking, and improving their finances. My next step was to go wide and come up with multiple concepts with the content strategy team, which we narrowed down to the following:
Concept 1: All in One Place
Many people don’t have a single source of truth for all their financial insights. NerdWallet offers a consolidated journey, giving them insights, guidance, and more all in one app.
While we continue to highlight our features, the main focus is on the emotional benefits – grounded in the idea of possibility and confidence that NW will guide them through their financial journey today, tomorrow and beyond.
This concept also creates a brand-building touchpoint, building on our evolving illustration style.
Concept 2: Big Picture, Little Picture
Get quick, high level insights (the big picture) as well as the more detailed breakdowns (the little picture). We focus on NerdWallet’s features through stylized UI, which allows us to remain visually distinct from the app store.
Concept 3: Choose Your Own Adventure
By asking a few initial questions about our audience’s goals, we’re able to personalize the benefits and features that’ll help them get there.
Stakeholder feedback
We quickly realized concept 3 was too high a lift for our timeline and scope (which entertained animation as added delight), so I earmarked it as a future state explore – noting the potential around a quiz format as well as giving non-members a tour before committing. We therefore aligned on further iterating the first two concepts.
Design
While diving further into the two remaining concepts, we kept being drawn back to the aspirational tones of All in One Place while still highlighting the features and tools to meet people where they’re at now financially and plan for their futures. It allowed us to move away from the purely functional and put our brand statement at the forefront: that our passion is your life well spent.
After a number of illustration and copy rounds while exploring pagination patterns and parallax, I ended up stripped away some of the complexities to focus on launching on time to start gathering insights. The final design took a simpler approach with standalone screens:
Testing & results
The redesign rolled out as an A/B experiment over several weeks. The result yielded a statistically-significant 4.3% lift in install-reg rate – while this seemed like a modest improvement, install-reg is a notoriously hard metric to move and a key top-of-funnel success indicator that has an outsized impact on all of our post-reg success metrics. It was received as a successful redesign that resulted to a full roll out in January 2021.