SoFi FinTech App

The SoFi app's homepage has many information cards arranged randomly in a long scroll. Users find it difficult to navigate and locate what they need quickly.

Reorganizing the SoFi app homepage will improve user experience and allow for quicker navigation. This will lead to higher user satisfaction and retention rates.

I use SoFi as my everyday finance app. I have a checking and savings account with the bank.

So one day I was searching for my credit score as I remembered always scrollling past it. It turned out, when I was intentionally looking for it, it was long and cumbersome to find.

I wondered if others were having the same issue that I was. So I went to online forums and app store reviews to investigate.

After inspecting over thirty reviews, I found that people felt overwhelmed and frustrated. They said things like “the app is cluttered” and the UI feels “clunky”. They also claimed that the current SoFi app was too “time consuming to navigate”.

I took a step further to verify these complaints, so I interviewed four daily users of mobile banking apps, even beyond SoFi. I asked about their expectations from a banking app, and compared them with what SoFi currently offers.

My two biggest learnings were:

These problems were seriously affecting user satisfaction and potentially, retention for SoFi. It was particularly concerning because SoFi has no physical branches. The app is the sole point of contact between customers and the brand.

If the app proved to be too daunting for users, they may stop using SoFi altogether.

I also understood SoFi’s marketing goals when it came to mixing promotional items with account-related information. But currently, the focus on promotion was impacting the user goals negatively, so we needed to find a greater balance between the both.

My goal was to improve the SoFi app homepage to help users find relevant, account-related information faster.

So I crafted a problem statement that would help guide my effort:

My first step was to clearly define the issues with the homepage, as currently, I was dependent on general user complaints. So I felt a Heuristic Evaluation exercise would help me define the key usability issues and areas of improvement.

I learned the app had good, consistent UI and interactions, but it was very cluttered with different topic areas, all on one scrollable page.

And so, information hierarchy was a big issue, because it was hard to differentiate between educational, promotional, and account-related information. Every user has a different priority at a different given time, so its best to clarify this and organize in a more user-friendly manner.

The cluttered experience was also causing cognitive overload. With so many inputs, reminiscent of social media scrolls, the dopamine-charge was in full effect. And the big question was:

Is all this really necessary on a single page?

Interesting note: I was a Brand Identity designer in my past career. So similar to how I presented logos, I made sweet, mild, and spicy explorations in each sketch. That basically means, the more spicy the design is, the more effort and resource investment it would take.

After weighing some pros and cons, I chose a combo of Mild A & B to move forward with.

The single navigation would now split into various tabs, filtering for each card type.

Though I wasn’t ready to design yet. I still needed to understand the scope of card items I was working with. So I logged into the app a few times, and counted how many cards were displayed to me in those sessions.

On average, I was shown 26 different cards, belonging to 12 different categories (for example: Invest or Loans).

I went through several iterations of a sitemap exercise to consolidate the categories. Finally, I combined the card items into 5 or 6 groups that I’d turn into tabs for the new app homepage.

With this, I was ready to wireframe and validate my solution. I produced a low-fidelity working prototype with the following solutions implemented:

With the prototype and interactions working, I validated it with five users. I devised a test to evaluate how easily users could learn to navigate and complete tasks. I found a 65% task completion rate, which was satisfactory but not impressive.

More than half of the participants expressed frustration with the new design due to a complicated navigation, and having to flip between so many tabs. Also, kept identical to the original app, the card titles were unclear, making it harder to find specific content.

So I knew I had to improve the new designs to ease the frustration users were feeling. I simplified the five tabs into just two (Summary & Explore).

I also converted the categories into clickable filters. Users could now scroll through a single page under the "Explore" tab and filter through several items to find something specific.

In addition, I flipped the card titles to give the content title more priority, whilst the category it belongs to becomes secondary. This should help users know where they are and create clear separation between each category.

SOLUTION #4

Saving users' time with filters

Users want to make quick decisions and save time when entering their fintech apps. Adding navigation filters in the "Explore" tab will allow users to filter between the most relevant information, quick.

I then created a high-fidelity prototype with changes from round one, to test and validate this close-to-final design with users.

The task completion rate increased to 80% while keeping all tasks constant. Participants enjoyed the experience this time and had a positive learning curve while using the app.

In this second round of testing, I discovered more insights. Users had difficulty decoding the "SoFi" category as it was listed on several cards related to ongoing blog-like articles and promotionals. For clarity sake, I decided to replace it with "Blog".

Also, many users had difficulty finding specific items, for example a specific blog post. To help users, I added a search bar in the "Explore" tab for quicker navigation.

In summary, task completion rate improved by 23% and task completion time decreased by 14%, resulting in higher user morale, better success rates, and more time saved by the users with this new design.

SoFi has a great task of putting many things into a single app, and that creates challenges to make it consumable without being too overwhelming. With this final design, we can expect greater satisfaction and retention rate of SoFi users.

Some things I wish I did differently include:

Next, I plan to compare the conversion rates of promotional cards between the old and new designs to measure their effectiveness. This will help us ensure that the new design not only enhances customer experience but also achieves our business goals.