Cash Advance
Head of Design + Product Designer | Brightside 2020
My role
Vision
Prototyping
Design
Team
Myself - Designer
Adam - Project Manager
Neha - Engineering Lead
Tools
FIGMA
Timeline
4-5 weeks
Context
About 12 million Americans use payday loans annually. On average, a borrower takes out 8 loans of $375 each year and spends $520 on interest. Even though payday loans are characterized as short-term solutions for unexpected expenses, about 81% of borrowers use payday loans to cover ordinary living expenses over the course of months. These borrowers are indebted about five months of the year.
Assumption
Payday loans are familiar and easy to use for borrowers that live paycheck to paycheck. Borrowers are not spending less than they earn and have not built up a sufficient savings buffer.
Area of opportunity
Brightside’s mission to improve the financial health of working families extends to having affordable options to our users that struggle to make their income meet their expenses. How might we prevent large dollar penalties for our users down the road and build a financial cushion?
Discovery
Competitive analysis - Adam (Project Manager) and I did some competitive analysis on what others were doing in this market and how they incorporated money advances into their product offering. We looked at whether the advances were their core product or if it was additive to the product as a whole.
Overview
To help solve smaller money emergencies, we want to leverage our Brightside Spending Account and our employer relationship to provide small dollar advances quickly to our users. Currently our lending products start out at $1,000, which makes sense for someone who has fallen further behind, but is a costly option for someone who just needs a few dollars to make ends meet before the next paycheck.
Target Audience
As a user struggling to make my income meet my expenses, there are times that I fall a little short from a balance perspective. I have a few options available (payday loans, TrueConnect/Salary Finance loans, etc.), but those are costly, take a few days and can lead to larger than intended loan sizes.
Brainstorm Part 1
Making lists - Adam (Project Manager) and I went thorough an exercise where we listed out all our thoughts about how this feature would work.
Brainstorm Part 2
I than took our brainstorm list and development a high-level flow map that shows the entire vision of the cash advance feature… cash advance without limits!
Flow map:
Vision of Cash Advance Product
1. User would take small advances from their paychecks with no penalties or interest
2. User could easily payback the advance through payroll deductions
3. User could get a $50 Cash Advance in a pay period
4. User could get a $100 Cash Advance in a pay period, if they had a Brightside Spending Account
5. Users would be nudged to save when taking a Cash Advance to support better financial behaviors
6. Brightside would not make money off this product
Define
MVP Scope: In collaboration with Adam (Project Manager), Neha (Engineering Lead) and myself we took the vision and narrowed down what the scope of MVP would looked like. We used our success metrics to guide our discussions in keeping the project small:
1. Users could only access Cash Advances through a Brightside Spending Account
2. Users were limited to a fixed dollar amount of $100’s per paycheck
3. To avoid loan regulations on the Cash Advance product deductions/payments could be canceled anytime
4. Brightside would introduce better savings habits separately from the Cash Advance technology
Brightside metrics:
Show adoption from this product being available
- Metric: % of new engage who open spending account same day
Understand the cost and engagement of offering cash advances
- Metric: $ unable to recover
- Metric: First day engage → Spending account (what brought them in)
MVP Flow map:
Wireframes
With requirements in place I started working on the baseline screens of the experience. The example below shows the flow of a users first time experience getting a cash advance within the Brightside Spending Account.
Use Cases
I further worked with Neha (Engineering Lead) to iron out the use cases, which would later translated to stories for our sprints.
Testing
With time constraints, I was only able to do light testing with Brightside employees over Zoom. I also used design teams weekly design jam sessions to discuss the project.
For the first pass of the Cash Advance screens I was limited to using components that were in our design system library. From the testing I was able to identify 3 problematic areas:
1. Hierarchy and copy wasn’t simple enough to understand quickly
2. Payroll deduction process was unclear as to what they needed to know from the tracker
3. Users didn’t know when the cut off date were if they wanted to make changes/stop payment to their cash advance
Design
1. To address the hierarchy problem on the main screens I needed to create new design components. I worked closely with the Design System Lead to design these new components for the library, we made sure the components were thought about outside the contexts of the Cash Advance project to ensure they would be scalable to use in the future.
2. & 3. With the Pizza Tracker being fundamental for the user to understand in order to use the Cash Advance product it was redesigned. For scalability the tracker was turned into a vertical component, which allowed us to add in more details of what was happening during each step. The steps were simplified and we relied on the copy to provide users with a better understanding of the process.
Visuals:
Delivered
Unfortunately right before this feature launched COVID hit and Brightside lost their biggest customer which was around 50,000 users. We have not gotten to see any large scale data on how the cash advance product would have preform in its target market.
Data:
- 11 people use the cash advance feature in 2020
- 1 person used it 9 times over the course of a year
- Everyone paid their advances back
Next Steps
This feature is waiting for more data. When it picks back up again I would like to deep dive into the user who took the 9 advances and I would love to move forward with more of the behavioral ideas we had in order for clients to build savings. The ideas that clients would have to save more, the more they borrow, or possibly add education in the experience so clients could think about saving for the next emergency while taking the cash advance.