Edquity
Company:
Edquity is a platform designed to help high school and college students budget easier. As a one-stop-shop solution, we provide tools for college selection, financial planning, and budgeting that helps students with each and every financial decision that arises.
My Role:
As a Product Designer at Edquity, I’ve had the unique opportunity to wear a wide variety of design hats. I’m currently focusing on our mobile strategy for our core product: a budgeting tool for college students. I’m redesigning interactions to improve user education.
Onboarding
The initial onboarding of the app left users questioning the value provided and how they could best use its functions. Though it was only three screens I worked with our Chief Product Officer to decide on goals for the screens: show real features, explain values, and provide familiarity with functions. Onboarding was redesigned to make the flow more intuitive and provide value upfront: Opting for function elements instead of illustrations to create familiarity once users log in. This particular design was more of a luxury than a necessity given the tech stack. React native didn’t allow for the initial interactions so I worked with developers trim the timing of the movement of individual elements.
User Education
Through a series of user interviews, we discovered our participants wanted a lot more user education than we had anticipated. We began to reassess our interaction flow, information architecture, features and micro-interactions to better detail the journey we wanted users to take. We explored a series of methods for user education from modals, to push notifications, nested information etc. We opted for cards because of their upfront actionable steps. Adding in onboarding cards give us the opportunity to walk users through complex flows and features.
Feedback Loop
One of the biggest points of friction in the app was that users had no point of recourse when they were confused. Our help section lacked content and while it was easy to navigate to it was hard to navigate from because of technical integrations. Given the time constraints, we opted for an abbreviated help section. Creating a way for users to contact us about bugs, questions or just general ideas about how we can be better was crucial. Deciding to house this within the Help section was a no brainer. The in-app help center acts as an extension of our more detailed online help section.
Onboarding Strategy
As a means of introducing new users into some of the complex budgeting flows, we set up trial transactions and envelopes for the users to walk through. These examples would show them their way around the app.
What went wrong
Existing onboarding relied on a lot of user self-discovery. The introduction of cards gave us the opportunity to disguise user education as interaction. The cards provided a way to display our most important functions through interactive flows the user would be taken through.