Overview

Compare your categories allows BNZ customers to see their top 5 spend categories for the month or choose 5 that are relevant to them. The activity tool lives within the everyday banking mobile app and was created with the intention of helping customers be better with money. Category compare helps provide transparency to customers by breaking down their spending from merchants automatically into 25 categories such as; groceries, pets and shopping. The feature allows customers to drill down specifically into monthly category spending habits and how they are tracking in comparison to the month before.

Understanding your finances can be stressful.. 

“How might we surface customer's spending habits in easily digestible bits of information that can be used to track spending in one category compared to the month before?”

Background

Category comparison is in addition to the spend tracker within the Activity feature. The feature came out of the beta release testing in September/October 2018. There was a survey completed with over 100+ participants and the next spend analysis that customers felt would offer the highest value, most desired was a category comparison. 

Users and audience

The feature is for BNZ customers who are digitally active on mobile. While the feature is accessible for everyone using this service we did design with two specific users personas in mind which were created as part of a wider research project for understanding who our BNZ customers were. The users that we had at the fore-front were:

The sieve (Lillian)
‘My money seems to go out as fast as it comes in and I’m never quite sure where its all gone’

The futurist (Angus)
‘I like to plan ahead and I am really focused on making sure I am set up for the long term’

These customer groups were targeted as it gave us a good base of a customer who had little financial literacy and understanding of their spending compared to a customer who had more knowledge but still wanted to learn more.

Roles and responsibilities

The activity feature has taken a team of 70 people over two years, from ideation to implementation. This has included a wide range of teams including the CX research, UX research, UX design, UX content and the everyday mobile banking team. 

Compare your categories was a much shorter timeframe as the initial research phase had been covered. I was the Product Designer on this feature and worked alongside a Design Lead, a Content Writer and the Everyday Mobile Banking team.

My particular role in this feature was to have a customer focused design process, by analysing research, concept sketching, wire-framing, prototyping, attending customer sessions and then crafting the user interface.

Scope and constraints

This project was unique in regards to the fact that it was during the peak of lockdown in New Zealand due to Covid-19. Everyone involved was not only having to juggle the new concept of remote working but were also having to learn new tools in order to work collaboratively and work out how we could still do customer sessions in a new virtual manner. 

Additionally, there were a few constraints technically that didn’t allow us to have the ultimate customer experience that we desired. One of those was real time transactions which did constrain some of the scope we were working with such as receiving certain merchant information. However, this a feature that we are planning on growing and transforming over time so some of these barriers won’t always be a technical constraint and we can continue to develop and improve the feature.

Research

The research team did some co-design sessions in November with some customers to establish what are the most important bits of category comparison and what this may look like. 

Some of the key findings were: 

• Customers want to know how they are doing, how they are doing this month compared to last month or this year compared to last year. 

• I want to feel like I’m getting ahead

• I don't have an easy way of knowing how I’m doing, and I don't want to go through the effort of putting the details in as life gets in the way.

• I want to be able to tell what spending is necessary and what is unnecessary, so that I know where my money is going and where I could be saving more/spending less.

Additionally to the co-design sessions, I spent some time going through the initial research for the activity feature. This was extremely beneficial for me to understand how customers view their spending, how they track and what would make it easier and simpler for them. 

I did some secondary research into fintechs and how they were doing some personal finance management tools, this gave me an insight into competitors' offerings and how they handle the data. 

Quick fire concepts

I time-boxed a morning to conceptualise a range of ways we could display the data with the information we needed, these were rough sketches and UI explorations in sketch to get all my ideas out before fleshing out a couple of ideas that we would go into usability with.

Usability

The first set of usability was to establish what the experience of category comparison would be and how customers would navigate to it. All the rounds of usability where done with customers who had either a Lillian or Angus money persona. 

For the first round we wanted to find out: 

• Can users navigate to it?

• What should the data explain?

• How do they want to see it?

• What will they do with the information? 

From the findings we found out that the navigation wasn’t clear enough and the top 5 wasn’t useful to customers. They wanted to choose categories that they had control over. This was due to necessity vs discretionary spending. 

‘I am rather more interested in categories I CAN influence’

We also had some extra findings about the bar graph being a preferred option for user interface as they found it easier to digest. 

‘The bar graph isn’t as visually appealing as the PIE but it’s telling me more’

From these findings we moved into the next phase of usability where we had a clearer navigation that allowed customers to go into the activity feature and then pick the area they wanted to dig into more. This was a clearer interface architecture. The UI design was more set in stone for this round after improvements from the initial usability and we improved the flexibility for the ‘top 5’ allowing customers to choose the ones important to them. The findings from this session helped validate some of the struggles that customers found in the initial sessions.

Improving the interaction 

The next phase of the experience was to find out how customers would interact with category comparison when they tap on a bar and reveal what data is appropriate. We had some findings from the initial sessions where customers revealed some things that they would potentially expect from this feature.

Things to explore were: 

• A short phrase comparing your performance to compared to the last month.

• Merchant/payee top spends and showing how many transactions.

• How are they tracking over a 3/6 month period?

• Category position of 1st, 2nd, 14th etc. 

These were some of the concepts I came up with: 

The design solution for tap on bar was much more stripped back from the initial concepts, this was so that we weren’t overloading the customer with too much information. We wanted it to be digestible, small snippets. Additionally some of the information that we included could be found in the spend tracker. It was good to push out the design as far as we could and then reduce it to the most important key data.

Outcomes

We followed a customer focussed design process, where we showed simple design with concise content to make it easier for customers to track their spending. We used language that was stating facts rather than judging habits, ‘So far, you’ve spent $299.40 on bills’ and used language customers would understand, like ‘where your money went’ rather than ‘top 3 merchants and payees’. We provided custom illustrations which acted as navigation and teasers for each activity feature. Overall, we did continuous improvement based on collaboration, concepting, customer feedback and testing. We refined our designs, understanding what makes spend tracking and categorisation more meaningful for our customers. I look forward to how we can improve this feature in the future. 

Recognition

2021 • Best Design Awards
Bronze

Software

Sketch, Invision