Overview

Creating an architecture for the TotallyMoney app experience that allows for scalability and growth, creating an experience that facilitates solutions and content around real customer problems and needs.

Problem statement

As the TotallyMoney experience grew, our existing app struggled to support new features and future expansion. Many features lacked a designated space, leaving the home screen to act as both the central hub and activation point. The app’s structure had remained largely unchanged over the years and wasn’t fully optimized with customers in mind. It was time for a redesign to enable future growth.

Securing space in the roadmap for foundational projects like this can be challenging. As a Product Design–led initiative, this project needed to align closely with ongoing features and roadmap priorities, requiring strong collaboration across product teams and the wider company.

Our vision beyond the initial discovery:

For our customers: The app feels intuitive, personalised, and relevant. They enjoy their experience and engage organically.
For our teams: The app is cohesive, scalable, and extensible, designed to support future product and commercial growth.

Users and audience

Customers using the TotallyMoney app experience. Our app customer base had grown significantly since I joined the company in October 2020 (cause or causation? 😀) from 73,000 monthly active users to around 150,000 monthly active users at the start of this project. Today it is double that and now accounts for over 50% of our active customer base.

Monthly actives users on the TotallyMoney App

Roles and responsibilities

Lead Product Designer on this project, working alongside our Product Design Director, User Research, and other members of the design team. The project required close collaboration with Product Managers, Engineering, Marketing, Commercial, and Copy teams.

Initially running from July 2022 to June 2023, the project resumed in January 2024. Recommendations have been implemented by product teams from late 2023 to the present.

Scope and constraints

From the outset, we aligned on this project as a discovery initiative to establish foundational principles for our app’s architecture. Implementing the recommendations would be the responsibility of our cross-functional product teams (Missions).

Our process

We could feel the app’s structure straining with each new feature. In solving new customer problems, we were unintentionally creating new challenges. The home screen had become the default location for every feature, as product teams favoured this high-traffic area, often competing to place their updates prominently. This approach was fostering customer behaviour patterns that, while effective in the short term, would hinder the product’s scalability and future growth.

Starting this project, we identified key milestones:

Understanding: How is the app currently structured? How do customers use it today? What are they seeking from TotallyMoney, and why?
Exploration: Based on these insights, how can we create an app structure that balances customer needs with current and future business goals?
Recommendations and Principles: How can we develop a clear set of recommendations and guiding principles that our Missions teams can align with and use to shape roadmaps and features over time?

Understanding

We aimed to take a user-centered, research-driven approach. Before engaging customers, we needed a deep understanding of the current app structure. Mapping the entire app was a challenging but valuable task, providing us with a comprehensive view of the experience. Today, we continue to update and reference this map. We then aligned this visual structure with a technical version from our engineering team, revealing how pages are organized in the build.

Initial visual map of the TotallyMoney app

Through workshops with key stakeholders, we identified a set of key tasks we believed customers came to accomplish. We validated these with around 300 TotallyMoney customers through a short survey, asking them to select their top three tasks.

While this project didn’t have specific metrics initially, we wanted a way to ensure that future implementations would positively impact the user experience. With insights from the top tasks, we created a baseline study on app navigation and architecture, which we plan to repeat annually. The study tested six core tasks for TotallyMoney customers, with a mix of moderated and unmoderated sessions (10 of each).

The baseline study offered clear insights and guidance:

Wayfinding

• Users relied heavily on the Home screen to access deeper content rather than using the navigation bar, highlighting the need for improved structure.

• The Credit Report Insights/Eligibility Hub was hard to locate, though users found the information helpful once accessed.

Proposition

• Users didn’t fully understand the Borrowing Power feature, which measures eligibility—a known issue from past customer feedback.

Labelling

• Users expected to change their address in the “My Details” section.

• Labels for credit report features like Score History and Searches were confusing.

Offers

• Finding credit cards and loans presented no major usability issues, apart from minor bugs that were quickly addressed.

Another essential insight we sought was how our customers perceive the relationships between our features and services. We asked 30 TotallyMoney customers to organize our app as they thought it should be structured through a card-sorting exercise. While the results weren’t as conclusive as we’d hoped (they rarely are), they revealed some compelling themes to guide us:

Priority-based organisation: Participants categorised features and information by level of detail and importance, using terms like “high-priority,” “essential to know,” “overview,” and “essential.”
Time-based grouping: Some participants organized features according to time, such as current, past, and future contexts, with category names like “current,” “past & patterns,” and “history.”
Type-based grouping: Another approach grouped items by type, with categories such as “personal info” and “credit info.”

On average, customers created 3–4 categories for the cards, providing us with valuable themes to consider for future structuring.

Exploration

Aligning customer insights and data with our company’s product vision, we explored several updated app structures, ultimately selecting one to move forward into testing.

The proposed structure organizes the experience into five main tabs, incorporating the past/present/future themes identified in previous tests while preserving the strong commercial presence of our credit product offerings.

Home:
A personalised hub that aids in navigation and presents timely, relevant information.
Customer account:
Not a main tab but accessible from Home, containing personal and preference information.
Credit profile:
A comprehensive view of the customer’s credit products and file, including historical credit behaviours.
Improve:
Provides insights into how past behaviours affect current standings and offers actionable steps for improvement.
Offers:
Centralizes all monetization journeys, helping customers understand eligibility and available options.
Build:
Initially conceived as a place for customers to view their current financial situation, with features like the Payment Planner and potential subscription services.

Prototype used for testing the proposed structure

Through a series of tree tests and prototype studies, we iterated and refined this structure, validating each section’s purpose. Based on feedback and internal discussions about limiting investigations into paid products, the “Build” tab was reimagined as “Monitor.”

Monitor:
Offers insights into daily financial decisions and their potential impact on the credit score, featuring tools like the Payment Planner.

Recommendations and principles

Alongside the new structure, we developed a set of guiding principles to support implementation and inform future decision-making.

Our core principles were:

Everything has a home – Cross-navigation is Key:
Content is organized into logical sections, yet accessible through multiple pathways to improve usability.
Better landing destinations:
Designing top-of-stack experiences that reduce reliance on the home screen for all content and actions, while creating more contextual landing spots for communications
Show snippets, don’t tell:
On key landing destinations, we elevate essential information at a high level, guiding users to explore deeper details as needed.
No unnecessary navigation levels:
Our review showed some content was buried five or more levels deep, with information repeated in multiple areas. We aim to keep information as close to the surface as possible.

Implementation

What began as a side project, initiated by a frustrated Product Design team, has since delivered significant improvements to the app experience, with its guidelines and recommendations still in use today.

This project achieved:

New top-level screens for each of the five tabs, all built with our updated design language, FutureVision24.
A reimagined credit report section, anchored by the new Credit Report Overview and an improved page structure.
Updates to the Home screen.
The creation of the Improve tab, complete with a top-level screen and expanded content.
The introduction of the Monitor tab, featuring its own top-level screen.

Revisiting the baseline

When we first envisioned a baseline study, we committed to the idea that maintaining the app’s architecture and structure would never be “done.” In January 2024, we ran an updated version of the study to identify issues with both individual features and the overall app experience. The study showed marked improvements, but also highlighted key areas for further focus.

Our cross-navigation principle, while successful in offering access to features from multiple parts of the app, unintentionally introduced complexity for engineers and confusion for customers. Features were accessible from various locations as intended, but due to technical implementation, they were built in two different parts of the app, each with its own “home.” This led to some features being accessed in multiple areas of the app.

To resolve this, we worked closely with engineering to refine the app’s navigation principles:

Cross-stack navigation to enhance top-level page experiences.
Redefining home screen navigation and entry points.
A scalable, flexible method to activate product tables from anywhere within the app.

These small updates and tweaks to our guiding principles had a significant positive impact on app usage. Total Overview page views increased by 90,000 per week, with a 56% increase in activity within that section.

Outcomes and lessons

Throughout the (long) duration of this project, we’ve learned several key lessons:

As your product and offerings grow, it’s crucial to keep scalability in mind; without it, the user experience will eventually hit a breaking point.
Information architecture is never “done.” It will evolve as we learn new insights or pivot in new directions.
Guiding principles and flexible foundations are essential for supporting growth and ongoing evolution.
Continuously maintain a baseline of your experience. Stay attuned to how customers are using your product and the challenges they face.

Evolving the architecture of the TotallyMoney app