UX Case Study
Real Work
How to 5x Engagement of a High Friction Feature
🔥 Results
5x
Average monthly sessions scheduled
2x
Coaches added since launch
7
Key learnings from testing
The high friction feature in question is one-on-one financial coaching. Financial coaching is origin story of this product (SmartDollar) and our founder, Dave Ramsey. We know it has a massive positive impact on individuals, but the utilization rate was very low.
Let's take a look at where this feature started and how the design evolved. 👇
Here's a look at the final design in mobile breakpoints. Through this experience, users are matched with a financial coach just for them.
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B2B Challenge
SmartDollar is a business-to-business financial wellness benefit. The end user is not paying for the product. Without skin in the game, enrollment and engagement is a challenge.
The Challenge
SmartDollar is a financial wellness product that businesses buy for their team. There is only one add-on that clients can buy in addition to the main program: one-on-one financial coaching for their employees.
There is a lot of clear value in financial coaching for the business. In their eyes, their team gets hands-on personal finance support, which means they will be more productive at work and less likely to do things like ask for cash advances or borrow from the company 401k. Easy decision.
The user’s perspective is a different story. They have to admit how bad they are with money in an hour-long session with a stranger. That’s a massive step that few are willing to make. You have to really understand that you have a problem that needs fixing.
🛟
I had a hunch that financial coaching was a lifeboat feature - a feature that doesn't get much use, but people love the fact that its there (like a lifeboat).
The Business Objective
We were tasked to increase total coaching sessions completed.
If a company used all of their coaching sessions, our relationship managers could call clients to see if they would like to buy more sessions. The client gets confirmation that their team is loving the benefit they bought for them! Also, the client is more likely to renew overall if they know their team is using the product and getting real help. A real win-win.
The User Problem
I had some personal reservations about doing a project around coaching. It seemed like only a small number of users would be willing to take advantage of financial coaching since it was such a high friction commitment. At the same time, I know just how life-changing coaching is. I was determined to figure this out.
We live in a world overdosed on comfort. How in the world are we going to get people to hop on a video call with a stranger and talk about uncomfortable things. We needed to draw user's in with whatever is most important to them.
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Pull users in, don't push features. Users will only take action if they understand what's in it for them. Connect their problem to the feature.
The actual user problem centers around the desire to feel less stressed about money. People are always looking for the easiest and best way to solve their problems. If we can find a way to present financial coaching as the best solution to that problem, we may have a chance of hitting our goal.
After talking to real users, we discovered the highest impact opportunity is I don't know how a coach can help me.
The Ideas and Experiments
We had lots of ideas of how to increase engagement with one-on-one financial coaching. Many were quick to build and test in the product. We spent some time testing these ideas out, measuring the results, and reporting to the stakeholders.
🧪
In Product Testing with real users is some of the most reliable data you can give your business. I do it whenever I can.
Most of these quick ideas failed our success criteria. But that's ok, we failed fast and learned a lot.
Most of our small ideas failed (oof 😅). But I had more ideas in the hopper.
There were two big idea that we knew would be a pretty high cost to build so I organized an unmoderated user test that could tell us if it would be worth the time and money spent building it.
The two big ideas were:
Coaching Social Feed - See how financial coaches can help you by seeing how they help others in real time!
Match with a Financial Coach - Take a small step by answer a few questions to get matched with a financial coach just for you. See a summary of the test below👇
We had a promising direction after some unmoderated user testing.
Pitching The Winning Big Idea
One big idea rose to the top: match with a financial coach.
In order for our request manager to get approval to spend time building this solution, we had to have some solid evidence that it will work. During user testing, we discovered that this experience forced users to consider their own situation. By bringing attention to their acute problem, users saw financial coaching as the most direct solution.
I summarized the rounds of testing that I performed and presented it to our stakeholders. We also collaborated with our engineers to make sure it was a feasible feature to build. Everyone decided that it was a worthy thing to build, so off we went.
🤰
Technical Feasibility → Always check in with the engineers early to get an idea of how long something might take to build. Long builds need more research and buy-in.
The Final Design
Personalization was the Key to Success
User’s want to feel like they are getting a coach just for them. By asking the user a few key questions in context of matching them with a financial coach, they begin to think about their own specific situation and how a coach could help them.
It doesn’t matter how much generic information we give users about financial coaching, it doesn’t really connect until it feels personalized to them.
The people that walked through this saw how their specific situation could be helped by a financial coach. Illustrations by me.
Results
Over the course of working on this feature, we significantly increased coaching sessions scheduled and completed! 🎉 It was around a 5x increase with all things considered. We released this feature in the middle of a month and it was still our biggest month ever.
✅ Around 36% of users that match with a coach end up scheduling and completing a coaching session.
✅ We had to add in more coaches, doubling the original number due to demand.
✅ We also got direct feedback from the coaches that they are receiving significantly more clients.
Some Friction is Good
Usually, a big part of my job as a product designer is to remove friction for the end user. In this case, I added in the right kind of friction and it cause more people to get engaged.
Friction causes us to stop and think, which can be rare nowadays.
To Wrap It Up
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Help users think about their problem, then offer a solution in that moment.
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Small experiments are great, until they're not. Sometimes, the more complex solution is the right direction. It usually takes more convincing.
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Ask good questions. The core of this solution was good, thought-provoking questions, which drive action.
Original UX case study researched, written, designed, and built by me, Jack Hawkins.
