Overview

A long-term initiative focused on delivering a data-rich, meaningful, and personalised experience of the TotallyMoney Credit Report and the customer’s financial situation. This aligns with the core principles of our app architecture, aiming to bring customer data to life by clearly explaining both the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of their current financial status.

Problem statement

The existing credit report experience fell short in empowering customers to make informed decisions based on their current situation. This section of the app lacked cohesive thinking and, with numerous bolted-on features, was primarily composed of pages which were in essence navigational lists (so many lists) that forced customers to do too much work to access their data.

When customers did reach the information, it often lacked necessary context.

29% of customers abandoned their journey at the top-level ‘Credit Profile’ screen.
30% of customers navigated through multiple sections, indicating a need for more information but also highlighting the effort required to find it.
Some critical information was buried up to five levels deep in the hierarchy.

Our long-term vision was to transform how customers engage with their information by presenting it in a meaningful and accessible way. This approach strikes a balance between providing just enough information at the right time and emphasizing both the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ of their financial data. This effort was aligned with our new app architecture guiding principles, ensuring easy access to deeper insights when needed.

Users and audience

TotallyMoney app customers who have access to their credit report

Roles and responsibilities

Responsible for the design and strategic direction/vision of this theme of work alongside the Product Manager. Overseeing, supporting and working alongside two product designers. Our Mission is comprised of 2 front-end and 1 back-end engineer, with close collaboration with Copy, Product Marketing and Compliance teams.

Scope and constraints

As an ongoing theme of work, we would tackle any constraints within each project. This project would be a stress test of our new guiding principles for the app architecture.

Our process

Our app’s guiding principles provided clear guardrails for our approach:

We knew we needed to:

Create a great top-level experience for this section of the app.
Offer customers concise, relevant information snippets with the option to delve deeper as needed.
Minimize unnecessary navigation layers.

We also established specific principles for our vision of the credit report:

Prioritising important, personalised content at the highest appropriate levels of the structure.
Balancing the focus between the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ to provide deeper insight.
Enabling customers to understand the historical context behind their financial situation.

With these principles, we aimed to:

Boost customer usage and retention within this section.
Increase exposure to relevant data and information, enhancing user engagement and understanding.

The vision

As a mission, we drew upon the recommendations from the App IA project to evaluate their implications for the customer’s Credit Report and align them with our mission objectives. Collaborating in workshops with colleagues from the App IA project, we explored the purpose and potential structure of the credit report section, coalescing around the idea of enabling customers to understand both the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of their credit report over time, from the present back through their financial history.

With research insights from the App IA project, previous studies, and app usage data, we recognised that the status of the customer’s credit accounts was a critical component of their report. Additionally, we aimed to unlock the ‘why’ behind their credit score. Leveraging data from our provider, TransUnion, we could trace this ‘why’ from the current day to when the customer first opened their TotallyMoney account. By empowering customers to explore these insights over time, we sought to shed light on the reasons and behaviours that led to positive or negative changes, guiding their future decisions.

Credit reports contain lots of information and data, with some elements consistently vital for the customer to access each time they view their report. Other data points are only significant when changes occur. For instance, there is little need to highlight the absence of CCJs (County Court Judgments) unless one is present in their report. Our goal was to ensure the experience emphasised essential, consistent information while remaining adaptable to highlight other data points when relevant.

After thorough exploration, we established a proposed vision, structure, and a set of guidelines. We identified that focusing on exposing the ‘whys’ behind the customer’s score history would be the most impactful starting point for this initiative and proceeded with updates to the score history section.

Proposed structure of the Credit Report section

Initial vision of a structure that allows views through periods of time

Score history - Exposing the ‘why’ of a customer's credit score

This was a project we put in the very capable hands of the mid-weight designer in our Mission, Lorraine while I took on a guiding and supportive role. The existing iteration of Score History was a simple, lengthy list of score changes since the customer’s first interaction with TotallyMoney. We recognised the need to elevate this experience and challenged Lorraine, alongside our Lead UI Designer, to craft an engaging and interactive design that would bring joy and insight to customers as they explored and understood the reasons behind their score changes.

Lorraine and the team successfully delivered an experience that met and exceeded our brief. We envisioned this feature as the centrepiece of the new credit report, and the result lived up to that aspiration.

While the initial designs were well-explored and tested, we incorporated a feedback module post-launch to gather valuable insights. This feedback enabled us to iterate on the first version effectively. With Lorraine moving on to lead another mission, I took over the subsequent enhancements, which included:

• Introducing a ‘Today’ button to easily return customers to the present.

• Smoothing the scrolling experience for better navigation.

• Adding a yearly view to showcase score changes over a specific year.

• Displaying new information when a customer’s credit score band or score changes.

The release was a great success, with monthly active users (MAU) for this feature rising from approximately 35,000 before launch to over 120,000 by January 2024.

Score History iterations including yearly view

A great top-of-stack experience for the credit report

Guiding and collaborating with our new Mission Product Designer, Arianna, we set out to build around our established centrepiece feature, enhancing the section to align with the guiding principles of our app architecture. Our goal was to deliver a strong, top-of-stack experience for this part of the app.

This experience needed to be data-rich, giving customers a clear, personalised understanding of their financial position and empowering them to make informed decisions. We incorporated features to keep customers updated with significant changes, track new developments (crucial for those monitoring potential fraud), and provide a balanced experience that celebrates progress or offered support based on individual circumstances.

After exploring and validating various structures for the page, we aligned on a design that provided just the right amount of information at the top level. This approach ensured that most users found the key insights they cared about or needed while offering clear pathways to more detailed data when desired.

The final page structure included:

Changes and the reasons
Based around Score History, this visual section of the page would highlight any new changes to the customer's credit report
Credit Insights
All about the customer's credit accounts, how much they were using, the payments they have made and ways to monitor their usage.
Searches
A key indicator of the customer's data being used each month is credit searches. From soft searches when browsing credit products and creating credit reports to hard searches when applying for credit, searches were a key way customers monitored activity about them and the potential for fraud.
More information
The boring bit of the credit report until it isn't. This comprised their report details and ruling and judgements. Unless something had changed or a ruling had been added to their report, most of the information for customers did not change month to month. When something did change we made sure the correct visual and hierarchical treatment was applied.

Second-level page consistency

To complement the new data-rich top-level experience, we needed a consistent and effective way to present detailed information on second-level pages. The structure of these pages was critical, so we developed an adaptable template incorporating our new supercard pattern to emphasise the most important data and trend insights. The rest of the page was designed to be modular, accommodating various needs such as highlighting credit accounts, offering personalised insights, or providing historical context relevant to the customer’s situation.

This template also included educational content to inform users about the displayed data and guidance on contacting support if they found any wrong information.

The adaptable nature of the template streamlined the design and development process for second-level pages, enabling faster execution across the app. Since their introduction, these templates have been successfully implemented in the Overview, Improve, and Monitor sections of our app, enhancing the user experience with clarity and consistency.

Streamlining the experience

A legacy of the old Credit Profile structure was that features were created outside of the presentation of the credit report. These features would provide analysis of the information contained in the customer's report but would sit externally to that information at times. We wanted to make sure that analysis was baked into where the information was displayed.

This process started in our work on the top-level overview screen, we had a feature called Score Analysis which gave the customer context on three areas which had an impact on their credit score. We brought those key indicators to the top-level overview page; payments, usage and number of accounts, highlighting the current status and any changes and created rich second-level pages where the customer could explore more detail.

Another of those features we looked to integrate was Credit Assistant, a feature that never quite achieved what was originally set out for it. It contained the only place where we talked about the total amount of current debt for that customer and provided some historical looks at the customer's credit accounts. It also contained some challenges around data visualisation due to the way it presented data for the last full known month for their accounts, which could be two months out of date depending on when the account was last reported by the lender/provider. Armed with some insights from a customer research study we have looked to integrate the useful information from Credit Assistant into a singular place where the customer can access information about their credit accounts and their current balances.

Outcomes and lessons

Projects or themes of work like this can be so rewarding as you see the change over time of a whole section of the experience and the impact you can see in how customer care uses and consumes that experience.

Particularly with Score History, I think it gives TotallyMoney a differentiator to our competitors as we have gone beyond the what and given customers that valuable context of the why joining that up with other areas of the experience like Improve can help change behaviours and hopefully the financial situation of our customers.

A great personal lesson for me was that being a Lead does not mean you do everything. You work and collaborate with your team to set that defined vision and guidelines and then put the trust and space in your team to execute with a touch of their personality.

Stats

For the Overview section as a whole, we have approximately 125,000 weekly customers doing 174,500 visits
On the main Overview page, an average of 87,000 weekly customers doing 122,000 visits - up from 45,000 customers in October 2023
Overview lower level page views have risen from around 69,000 weekly in October 2023 to approximately 112,000 today
Monthly active users (MAU) for the new version of Score History have risen from approximately 35,000 to over 120,000 by January 2024.

Transforming the TotallyMoney Credit Report