My role at Cinch

As a product design lead, my role involved taking complex financial concepts and transforming them into human-centric, user-friendly, and easy to understand experiences and tools for everyone.

Our small design team of five closely collaborated with a cross-functional team. I worked hand-in-hand with engineers, data scientists, user research, and product managers. The overall product team was split into tracks (based on projects), which included 4-7 engineers, 1-2 data scientists, and a PM. Our design team worked closely to support multiple tracks.

Launching the Spending MVP

I joined Cinch’s UX team at the beginning of 2018. At the time, Cinch’s offering included just their personalized advice across different verticals—credit card debt, student debt, car and life insurance, and savings. The team was working on a new spending/budgeting experience, and I was able to help the team finish building out this significant feature. Our MVP was shipped in late February 2018.

Discovering the pain points of traditional budgeting

Before I arrived at Cinch, the team had a hypothesis that the traditional ways of line-item budgeting just weren’t working for people. The team’s research revealed that people found line-item budgeting, with apps like Mint, to be tedious and unforgiving. The average person doesn’t often have warm, fuzzy feelings when they think about money. Instead they feel uneasy, insecure, and often discouraged.

With so many people trying to survive the vicious paycheck-to-paycheck cycle, we wanted to create a better solution—one that was more flexible, realistic, and easy.

Introducing Pocket Money

Pocket Money was created as a target for the user’s discretionary spend over the course of a given month. As spending occurs, Cinch displays the single “left-to-spend” amount to help the user keep track.

In order to get a personalized Pocket Money number, users are prompted to link the bank accounts where they receive income, pay bills, and do their spending. Ideally users would link checking and savings accounts, as well as credit cards.

Gaining trust of a single number

Knowing it can be difficult to change a mindset, particularly something like line-item budgeting that is so familiar, we had to find ways to assure the user that they could trust and rely on their monthly Pocket Money number.

This consideration manifested in several ways:

• We provided an on-boarding experience that walked users through how Pocket Money is calculated.

• We allowed users to re-categorize transactions in order to properly identify their monthly income and bills.

• Users could any ignore transactions from their spending if it was a large, irregular expense, that wouldn’t normally be considered in their budget.

• We sent timely notifications and warning signals through SMS and email when at risk of over-spending.

Improvements to spending

After the initial launch of the new Spending experience, there was still a lot of work to be done. Together as a cross-functional team, we prioritized a set of features to continue building over the next few months. This included things that didn’t make the MVP, as well as other features and improvements to continue refining the experience.

Continued user research

While the team had our own list of improvements that were top of mind, we also wanted to continue user research to assess how the experience was being perceived and used thus far. With the help of our UX researcher, we first organized a focus group to gain additional insights into the behavioral side of spending and finances. Later, we conducted 8 remote usability sessions, where we focused on the user journey from sign up into the app, then around some conceptual mockups of work in progress.

Focus group findings

For the focus group, our UX researcher recruited 10 women between the ages of 25-40 to participate. They had never heard of Cinch, but all had some experience with budgeting and finances for themselves and/or their family. Our researcher led a variety of individual exercises and facilitated group discussions throughout the session.

End of month financial check-up

Our spending experience is structured around a month timeframe, so it was important to provide users with a summary of how their spending compared to their Pocket Money target, as well as set them up for the next month. Reflecting on previous months spending could mitigate impulse spending behaviors in the current month by “reflecting and resetting”.

Defining the new experience

I took the lead on redesigning the end of month review experience. Working closely with our data science team, we brainstormed to determine what data and information would be helpful to show. Taking the insights learned from our research into consideration, I envisioned providing the user with comparisons from previous months, and details of where exactly their money went. I also wanted to sprinkle in some narratives to provide encouragement when things went well, or to offer some actionable advice if they didn’t do so well.

Iterate, and iterate some more

During the design and definition stage of this project, I held several design sessions to review the work in progress and get feedback from various stakeholders and team members.

This project went through several rounds of iteration, mainly because there was so much information available to us that we could show! There were graphs and charts and numbers galore. What we needed was feedback from actual users to really hone in on what was most important from their perspective.

At this point, we had a few other design projects in the definition stage, so we took the opportunity to conduct some usability sessions with several remote participants. For this research, our goal was to gather feedback and determine comprehension, benefits and expectations.

The final outcome

Taking the research learnings, I again continued to iterate until landing on this final version below. These monthly financial check-ups become available at the end of each month, and past months are always accessible.