2018 / RESEARCH + DATA ANALYSIS + UX STRATEGY
ROLE
Product Designer
OVERVIEW
Guiabolso is a Brazilian application that helps you improve your finance by synchronizing all your bank accounts and credit cards in one place. It generates user friendly graphics and gives you helpful insight about your finances. So when it comes to cash or bank accounts/cards that we do not sync, we have a problem, since we lose considerable financial data from users and because they have to manually input those expenses into the app.
SCENARIO
My previous research aimed to understand how the first week of new users was like inside Guiabolso's app. Juliana, my dear friend and CRM Leader, wanted to find out which e-mails and push notifications made the most sense to the user in that first contact with the app and invited me to do the qualitative research of that study. When I was consolidating the results, I discovered that users saw no reason to use the app every day, but people who were using the Wallet feature came back almost every day to launch new transactions made with cash. I saw this as an opportunity, and then we decided to study the Wallet, focusing on iOS.
DATA CRAZY
Firstly, I started looking for secondary data, that basically is searching for information that are already available about the issue. So, I’ve found a Brazil’s Central Bank’s study from 2018 that talks about the relationship between Brazilians and cash and I discovered that:
- 96% of Brazilians still use cash;
- They use cash mainly for small purchases;
- They carry between $ 20 and $ 50;
- 29% of Brazilian people still receive their salary in cash.
Knowing this only encouraged us to work with Guiabolso's Wallet, because we fond it pretty curious that Brazilians still use cash, but not even 1% of our iOS’s base use our feature. With that in mind, we set out to deepen the problem using primary data research methods, which was broken down into data base analysis, competitor analysis, and interviews with current users that were using and were not using the iOS’s Wallet.
Vini was my Product Manager at the time, and I took advantage of his Excel and Data skills to ask every possible question about our metrics. My goal was to find out information about the Wallet feature on both iOS and Android apps and compare the behavior between bases. Some of the questions were:
- How many users who create a Wallet in Android return to the app in 7 days? and in 30 days?
- What is the average number of transactions post in the Wallet per week?
- What is the top 3 spending categories in the Wallet?
We've found a lot of cool things with this data analysis, but the most important thing we found out is what we called our Magic Number. We've discovered that users who posted over 6 transactions per week had a 90% chance of returning on the next 7 days. And that’s a really big thing for our company.
SEARCHING FOR REAL GOLD
As we already had a better understanding of the context of a user who had a wallet and did use the feature, we wanted to better understand why people did not create a Wallet or why they didn’t post values when they already had one. So I started to do interviews with users and a to analyze how competitors designed similar features. And here’s what I've found:
- People don't like to walk around with a lot of money in their wallets;
- They only use money for small purchases or when they know that the place doesn't accept card (or if the machine is broken);
- Cash is plan C and it is used only for convenience/urgency (POINT OF ATTENTION);
- People understand that controlling cash is more difficult and they need to have the exactly amount so they wont spend beyond their needs;
- Users have manual account to control accounts, cards and investments that we currently don't synchronize within the app (OPPORTUNITY);
- 50% of users said they didn't know that it's possible to manually control their cash, card or bank account inside Guiabolso (FAILURE);
- Users "keep in mind" or write down their cash expenses in a notebook or mobile phone, although they say our flow is simple. (FAILURE)
From what we’ve found in our metrics, user interviews, and competitors analysis, I was able to say what were our Do’s & Dont’s, that is, what we should and shouldn’t do next. Some of my recommendations were that we should:
- Work on the manual account as a whole;
- Encourage users to create a manual account to track cards or bank accounts that we do not connect yet;
- Encourage users to post at least 6 transactions per week (Magic Number!!);
- Increase the number of people who post in-app transactions, regardless of manual account type (this way we will have more accurate info about the user's financial situation and increase engagement);
- Improve access to the manual account (creating and posting transactions);
- Take advantage of user's context (we should ask our user where did the money that he/she got from the ATM go)
A LESSON LEARNED IS A LESSON EARNED
In short, we’ve found out that the Wallet feature did not make much sense, since Brazilians don’t use cash that often. Yet we should work on the manual account as a whole, because there are other opportunities such as posting expenses made with cards or investment portfolios we don’t synchronize today in Guiabolso.
Even with all those findings, the biggest lesson I’ve taken from this research is that a Product Designer is also responsible for finding out which way the team should NOT follow and discover what are the real opportunities that we should embrace.
Don’t hesitate to send me a message, I’d love hearing from you and I’d never refuse a nice chat + coffee: juliaxavierfernandes@gmail.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-xavier-2847555b/
