SoFi: Recurring Payments Tracker

Objective

Expand Relay’s features & further engage our users

We had the basics of a PFM tool, but our core user base still had needs we hadn’t addressed. On top of that, a lot of our highly engaged users still had reservations about making Relay their main PFM tool due to a lack of feature parity with other apps.
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Initial Research

User interviews coupled with competitive analysis

We began by conducting in-depth interviews with our members and working with our business partners to determine what would engage users the most.

Findings

Users crave predictability in their finances and go about achieving that in different ways

• The members we spoke to wanted to see future expenses so they could plan more effectively.
• From self-texts to calendar events, everyone had their own way of tracking their bills.
• A number of members expressed frustration with not knowing where their money was going each month.
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Solution

A crystal ball for your bills

Our proposed solution was a recurring payments tracker: a tool to help users see their recurring financial obligations for the month.
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Iterating in Lo-fi

Creating the expenses tracker

We wanted to make the expenses tracker feel both comprehensive, but lightweight. We also experimented with a few different types of data visualization to see what felt the best.

Iterating on the expense details

The expense details page was pretty straight-forward. We initially wanted to give users the ability to edit details of their expenses (e.g. due date, amount due, etc.), but also wanted to have a backup plan in case it wasn’t technically feasible right away.

Prototyping and User Testing in Hi-fi

Presenting the designs to our Member Advisory Board

SoFi’s Member Advisory Board is a group of highly-engaged members who are able to provide in-depth feedback on SoFi’s products and features. The notion of a bill tracking tool resonated the last time my team spoke with them, so we felt that they would be the perfect people to tell us if we were on the right track. We were also able to get some early feedback on new visual directions for the SoFi app.

Findings

The advisory board overwhelmingly preferred the list + calendar variant

While the advisory board found our explorations interesting, they were most pleased with the combo variant because it allowed flexibility in how users would track their bills. The classic list, however, was a close second.
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Results & Final Design Proposal

Tweak the list + calendar design to be more in-line with SoFi’s design system  

One bit of feedback about the winning variant was that the segmented control felt heavy and out of place. We had known that we were going to change it down the line and worked with our design systems team to create a lighter interaction.

Launch MVP

Due to the size of the project, we released a MVP in order to learn and iterate along the way

Our MVP is focused on the upcoming and paid bills lists and, instead of an expense details page, we take users to a filtered list of transactions. We plan to implement merchant logos as we get closer to our North Star design.

Final Designs

Our North Star designs and what we’re working toward rolling out:

Impact

Significantly increased weekly engagement and praise from our users  

After launching our MVP, we’ve noticed an uptick in the amount of users coming to Relay each week. Even now, our weekly active users continues to climb.

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