improving the off-boarding experience
Dreams is an app that makes saving money fun, and helps you achieve your dreams. We were asked to improve the off-boarding experience within the app, which for this brief included the completion screen when a user completes a set savings’ goal. Our research showed us there was a majority of users that never got to this completion screen, which made us design an off-boarding experience for the app’s pause and withdrawal feature.
the peak-end rule.
A lot of thought is put into on-boarding experiences, compared to endings and off-boardings. This pattern negatively affects users, and one main example can be explained by the peak-end rule. A user’s memory of an experience is based on the customer journey’s peak and end, which means that a bad ending will occupy half of the user’s memory of the experience in total, according to psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s book in behavioural science: Thinking Fast and Slow.
We created accounts to test the app, and made it possible for us to map out the customer journey as it is today: Dreams coaches you through your on-boarding process; encouraging you to visualize it, set a specific due-date, and gives you tips of savings hacks you can try out.
new insights – new directions.
This is the screen that the users are met by when deciding to withdraw the money, and thus interrupt their saving; Dreams is calling the withdrawing to “give up a dream”. The tonality shines a light on the aspect that they’re “giving up” and not neutrally cancelling an action; implementing that they are “giving up” on Dreams. The users in our interviews expressed, their feelings were like, giving up on themselves, and are left feeling shame, guilt and disappointment. Asking them to describe what kind of reply they’d like to be met by, was crucial to our further design decisions.
Insights to iterate from:
– Users would like to look back at their progress
– We need to change our problem definition to: “How can Dreams improve the experience of cancelling the dream?
ux writing.
Wanting our client to use another tone of voice, we designed a “coach concept”, chancing the copy throughout the app to reduce the shame. This concept has characteristics and behaves similarly to a coach. Its purpose is to help users feel proud over what they have achieved rather than feel disappointed. Dreams will guide and help you be aware of your success and believe in yourself, even though you may cancel your savings. We believe this will strengthen financial well-being – the company’s core value.
We took inspiration from the Swedish psychologist Lars-Eric Uneståhl who has studied mental training and coaching since the ’70s. His research shows that a coach should mainly focus on making sure that the client:
– creates attractive target images (on-boarding)
– creates an action plan (on-boarding)
– gets a higher self-awareness (recap in the ending-process)
– gets encouraged to reflection and insights (reflection in the ending-process)
– finds alternative ways of reaching the goal (in the pause function as a semi-ending).
result.
In our design we added the possibility for the users to describe their experience from saving money, in line with letting our client use a more coaching mindset. The coaching in Dreams allows you to reflect upon your experience, making it more personal and memorable for the user. Since the users said they’d like to look back at their progress, and feel good about their having started saving at all, we designed the app to do so: While you write your reflection on your saving experience, you have the possibility to check your accomplishments and steps you have taken to save money.
Our main insight, and the advice we gave our client, was that it shouldn’t be about the achievement per se – how much you can save differs so much between individuals. The app should focus on the fact that we actually can put money aside for a while; the real effort.”
Giving the users a clearer overview.
During the interviews with Dreams’ former users, we asked them what would make them use the app again:
“If they gave me the feeling of knowing that the money’s still mine, and that I could rearrange my settings and savings whenever and into whatever I’d feel like. Like in real life.”
This is why we developed Dreams’ function to “pause a dream”, from only a button with “pause dream” as CTA, to something visually engaging, visually explaining and with a text informing that the SEK 10 monthly payment (for using the app) is also on pause, and that the dream can be resumed whenever desired.
DESIGN WITH THE USER’S NEEDS IN MIND.
By validating the user’s need to pause, and by subtracting the tone of judgement and instead emphasizing with the user’s progress and highlighting their success, we think that the app is more likely to be used again. According to the peak-end rule they will now have a positive emotion related to their savings, and to Dreams as a company.
The design team consisted of me, Alexandra Gallus, Dalija Ayoubi, Olof Bygren, Kim Hylén, Emma Lundholm.