Credit Sherpa – Kevin Kim

Company

Credit Sherpa is a fintech business that focuses on improving the financial health of its users. The company differentiates itself from its competitors by putting customers' wellbeing first when making financial recommendations, rather than accepting payments.

Challenge

We were asked to create a trustworthy credit card recommendation tool for consumers looking to take out new cards or manage their credit card debt. 44% of users dropped after the first question and 30% signed up for emails in their current version.

Solution

The team redesigned their questionnaire to align with the target demographic - those with debt and those without - and created brand guidelines so the users are more willing to trust the financial service.

FINAL DELIVERABLES

Your personalized recommendations

The team spent six weeks redesigning the questionnaire and recommendation flow. The end goal was to make the flow more personalized and tailored for the end user. Our proposed design was accepted and shipped within a week of delivery.

EMPATHIZE

20% of Americans have more than $2,500 of debt

Credit cards can be a lovely thing. It’s simple, it’s sleek, and, most importantly, it’s convenient. But, an alarming number of Americans do not pay attention to the flipside of credit cards - interest. According to The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, U.S. households added $26 billion in credit card debt, the biggest increase among debt categories tracked. But, what gives?

Consumers aren’t taking advantage
of credit cards

After gaining a general understanding of the credit card market, we focused on consumer behavior. In order to achieve that, we crafted a screener survey in order to target users - those who are in debt and those who are not - who met our criteria.

After speaking with a broad spectrum of consumers, we were able to figure out their spending habits and their knowledge of credit cards. From our findings, we materialized our discovery into two user personas.

DEFINE

Financial recommendations should be tailored
and personalized

With the user insights that were collected and documented during our research, we grouped them into actionable areas to be improved. We then used a 2x2 matrix to prioritize the problems that were most important to solve for both the business and the users. The main takeaways were as follows:

Trust: Users are unsure whether they would trust site with their personal information
Copy: Users report confusion over the copy of the financial recommendation
Recommendation: Cards do not always match up with what users report wanting in a card

The group leveraged our findings in order to come up with four distinct areas of focus. We came to the conclusion that we would need to focus on Credit Sherpa's branding, questionnaire, recommendation, and the copy in order to achieve the goal of gaining the users' trust.

IDEATE

A customized message is key to getting users to
take action

As our user research suggests, users were looking for financial advice that was not only sensible, but also personalized as well. The team explored various designs during the UI sketch phase and ultimately came to an agreement with some of the components highlighted in green below. We also decided to customize two recommendation sections for people with and without debt.

It is important to build user trust through branding

The team created a brand identity in tandem with the wireframes. We dot-voted on the final logo - the mountain - which we believed exuded a sense of professionalism as well as trust. Color, text styles, and typefaces were designed subsequently.

Personifying the questionnaire flow to build trust

After coming to an agreement, we created different iterations of a lo-fi prototype and tested the questionnaire and recommendation flow with six users, both with and without debt. Users preferred to have a questionnaire that had a bit of a personal touch, resulting in a version with an avatar and dialogue.

Making financial recommendations simple and easy-to-understand

We put together the most successful lo-fidelity prototypes and presented them to the co-founders of Credit Sherpa. We ran some comprehension tests after and came to one final design - questionnaire iteration #2 and recommendation iteration #3.

PROTOTYPE

Personalizing financial advice for consumers

After our presentation and final selection on the overall look and feel, we began our hi-fidelity mockups. During this stage, we included our final visual identity for Credit Sherpa to give it a consistent and professional feel to the overall product. At handoff to engineering, we presented a prototype to show the questionnaire flow and discussed the shipping roadmap to prioritize changes.

Enhanced questionnaire

The new questionnaire is even more personalized and seamless, reducing friction when users input their financial information.

Smart visuals

A new brand identity was implemented throughout the site to induce a sense of professionalism and financial expertise.

Tailored recommendations

With the brand new recommendations page, Credit Sherpa is taking a complex recommendation and making it accessible for users of all backgrounds.

OUTCOME

Out in the wild

After presenting our final designs to the founders, the client was delighted with our work and shipped the product within a week of delivery. Our proposed design is currently undergoing A/B testing to measure the bounce and click-through rates. Given our optimized designs for both of our personas - one with debt and the other without - it will be exciting to see the outcome of this project!