PELICAN SITE REDESIGN

A design project for a financial product client’s website. Pelican creates a compelling and easy way to connect families with powerful, custom financial tools. We rebuilt Pelican’s user sign up process, gifting flow and savings journey and created a delightful and intuitive experience for their website.

CLIENT

Pelican

ROLE

Product Manager

UX Designer

UX Researcher

TEAM

4 UX Designers

TOOLS USED

Figma, Figjam, Google Suite(Doc, Sheets, Forms), Notion, Zeplin, Keynote, Zoom

OVERVIEW

For many families in America, figuring out how to pay for college can seem like an impossible prospect. With 58% of Americans having less than $5,000 in savings (Zippia) and only 57% of adults being financially literate (Gallup), the majority of people are not properly equipped or educated on how to prepare for their future.

GOAL

To help educate families on the importance of investing and connect them financial institutions to build customized saving plans for their future

DESIGN CHALLENGE

A huge population miss out on transformative college savings tools through no fault of their own.

There is massive potential to reach people who were unaware of the financial intricacies around college saving and customizable tools to leverage compound interest for that process but because of Pelican’s lack of brand presence, many families were not adopting and taking advantage of the service. Reach the target audience of newer parents and empower thousands of people to get an education.

How Might We create a compelling experience to easily connect families with the financial tools they need to save for college?

DISCOVERY

Because our client already had an existing site through Squarespace, I wanted to test how it performed with users to gauge how they were currently feeling about the site experience. I conducted 6 usability tests on Pelican’s existing website before implementing changes to also serve as a baseline for measuring success. We assigned users two tasks: signing up for a fund and sending a gift to a fund.

TESTING (SIGN UP FOR FUND)

TAKEAWAYS

  • Very unclear and time consuming process around starting a fund

  • The google form to create a fund did not give users a sense of credibility

  • The process for users to create a fund asked too many questions upfront and lead to drop off

  • A lack of delight or excitement when form is filled out

  • No clear next steps for user once fund is created

TESTING (SEND A GIFT)

TAKEAWAYS

  • Call to action language for sending a gift wasn’t clear or easily found on page 

  • Language and copy was not a credible way of donating money

  • The sending a gift experience did not feel gratifying

MARKET RESEARCH

In order to better understand space that Pelican operates in, we also conducted market research in order to identify what other financial planning platforms and adjacent products exist in the space and understand where Pelican would stand in comparison. We started with a Business Model Canvas (BMC) to better understand the business and then created a competitive feature analysis which helped us understand what kinds of features users expected out of a financial planning tool tool as well as learn about what kinds of features our competitors did and did not currently offer to see how we could potentially differentiate our product.

WHAT WE LEARNED

  • Crowdsourcing sites offer anonymous donation options for users which are commonly used

  • The client’s revenue goals are driven by users who sign up and are directed towards trusted financial partners

  • Our product is geared towards users who need personalized educational tools to become more financial literate

  • Users need a simple and easy yet secure and transparent way to share their financial information

SCREENER SURVEY

Our team was also tasked by the client to identify the two main target audiences for Pelican. So we screened 30 users and ultimately identified 12 key users to speak with one-on-one over the course of 3 days. They were new and expecting parents and have either sent their children to college or are planning to.

TAKEAWAYS

  • 86% of respondents have/are expecting children

  • 71% of users are college educated/plan to send their children to college

  • 72% of parents are over the age of 30 years old

  • 75% of users had a combined household income of $60,000+

USER INTERVIEWS

Once we identified users who would represent the product’s target audience, we conducted 12 user interviews. Then we gathered qualitative information about users to organize ideas and synthesized data from interviews before starting the design process, . Finally, we combined similar ideas into insights to better understand our user needs.

KEY INSIGHTS

Through speaking with users, I triangulated their responses and sentiments into six main key insights which ultimately would inform the way our team went about designing our product:

“I need to have trust and security when dealing with any financial transactions”

“I would like to be able to see my saving progress and the difference it makes”

“I want to feel appreciated for my donations to family and friends”

“I need to be able to organize finances in a more manageable way”

“I would like the option to discreetly send money to friends and family”

“I want to be reminded when important milestones occur”

After a brief first-round user interview, we synthesized the information gathered along with our key insights to create our User Persona. These key insights led to the creation of our two main personas, each of which represents a segment of Pelican’s user base: the Saver and the Gifter. Both personas ultimately served as a continual reference for who we were redesigning for.

PERSONA

Our primary persona Madeline represented savers and new parents whose . She was what guided our design process and made us root the design in the needs of the user.

TAKEAWAYS

  • New parents want to start investing but doesn’t know where to start or how to organize her finances

  • Madeline use’s Madeline needs a platform that makes it easy for her to begin a 529 plan and a way to be educated on the importance of investing

  • That is when pelican comes in and make her life easier

PERSONA

Our secondary persona, the Gifter represents friends and family who take an active role and invest in the lives of Savers and their children’s futures.

TAKEAWAYS

  • Thinks that talking about money can be a difficult conversation and hard to bring up and users do not want to add more stress to their loved ones

  • Wants to see where their money is going and how their contributions are making an impact

  • Likes to be able to share event for special events

  • Needs an option to personalize their donations or stay anonymous

DESIGN

Before going into the main design phase, we hosted a design studio session with our client to get them involved in the process. We started by asking everyone to draw out a user sign up flow and a gifting money flow and then presented our ideas. Once concluded, we curated a list of potential features based on design ideas we all agreed upon for the MVP and then further prioritized them based on technical limitations, user insights and our feature analysis.

PRODUCT PRINCIPLES

For our design, we also developed 3 key product principles that would help serve as the long-term goal and vision of the product and inform every design decision big or small:

INSIGHTS TO FEATURES

Through speaking with users, I triangulated their thoughts into insights which ultimately led to 6 main features included in the redesigned product.

Savings Dashboard

By creating a fund, Savers unlock access to their savings dashboard where they can see all different kinds of information every time they log in. From the dashboard, users can see their current goals, their progress over time, events, and which family members and friends are supporting their funds which will leave them feeling hopeful and accomplished.

Savings Goals

Savers can set up periodic ways to set aside money for their funds. Whether it’s weekly, monthly, or yearly, users can decide the pace of their goals and save on their terms.

Anonymous Donations

Gifters can choose whether they want a donation to be publicly viewed or anonymous . simply toggle to select

Thank You Cards

With Thank You Cards, Savers can send tokens of appreciation to each family member or friend that is actively or occasionally helping their child’s college fund grow.

Calendar and Events

Both Gifters and Savers can check up and be reminded of any upcoming birthdays, occasions or holidays. Savers can send out reminders and blast any of these events to raise funds while Gifters can add these dates to their calendar and be reminded to send money.

Confirmation Screen & Encryption Copy

Users must confirm their information and who they are sending money to so that they can feel more at ease and secure about their transactions.

USABILITY TESTING

Once we had our mid-fidelity prototype designed, we began testing it as soon as possible to get user generated learnings quicker and iterate faster. I conducted 2 rounds of usability testing. The goal of our testing was ultimately to uncover opportunities to improve the overall user experience by building on effective, efficient and enjoyable experiences for users.

We finished out our moderated testing with 10 users. Each participant was being asked to finish 5 different tests including find the closest local event near you, check event reviews, add new friends, check your calendar and redeem your rewards. In order to ensure continuity, we made sure to keep the questions the same for both rounds of testing.

Testing (Create an Account)

TAKEAWAYS

  • Users appreciate knowing what stage of the sign-up process they were in

  • Participants found the colorized version more delightful and easier to navigate due to higher contrast

MEASUREMENT

After shipping the design implementation to the Pelican development team, I utilized the Google HEART Framework to determine and provide key metrics to measure against. Given the use case for the product and the stage of the business, the key metrics that we would want to focus on would be Happiness, Adoption and Retention as those would be most relevant.

TAKEAWAYS

  • We will value how often our users are experiencing the site by reviews and satisfaction ratings of the website once it’s been developed further

  • We will also value if our users are remaining loyal to the product through monthly registrations, churn rate and LTV

  • Lastly to drive more adoption and grow the user base, we want to encourage more account creations, fund donations and aim to increase online presence through sharing funds on social

WHAT I’VE LEARNED

Stakeholder Interviews

Through working with a client, I was able to learn to better balance stakeholder expectations and business goals with user centered design. Because I was the one who headed up communication with our client, it was important I set up an introductory call and a meeting cadence with them in order to ensure we were on the same page about any decisions. In doing so, we were able to foster a good relationship and freely share ideas with one another which led to more inclusive and representative design and business decisions that would benefit users and the business.

Be an advocate for a more design forward culture and workflows

Because our client was still in the process of growing their business, not only were there huge opportunities for me as a designer to show them the value of user-centered and research backed design but also it gave me the chance to loop in as many key stakeholders as possible all throughout our time working together and especially in the design phase in order to have more buy in and work together more efficiently.

Test, test, test!

As a designer, it may not always be the case that I will be creating a product from scratch most of the time. Because our client already a website, rather than starting with research as usual. This ultimately taught me the importance of being flexible with my design process as well as how beneficial it is to test an existing interface before implementing changes to it as well as serve as a benchmark for measurability.