Lendio Onboarding
Business Financial Mobile App

The Lendio mobile app provides financial insight to small business owners to help them thrive.

The Team
Mobile Platform Team:
Product Manager Director, Software Engineer Director, Software Engineer, Product Designer
My Roles
The lead designer responsible for:
Providing user research, flows, and designs, from conception to final release.
Apple app store buttonGoogle Play store button
Multiple iPhones displaying screens from the CardBay app.

Problem

Lendio built a mobile app in the incredibly short time of 3 months. The account creation and onboarding experience was built quickly and needed to be validated and tested with users.

Solution

Run monitored user interviews to discover areas of friction as users create accounts and get started with the app.

Original Designs

These were the screens created by the team. I designed the Business Information and Business Goals section of this original flow.
    Phone screens of the onboarding flow

    Discovery

    I ran 5 user interviews and asked these questions as they set up an account. After the interviews, I took the findings and performed an affinity mapping exercise to find patterns.
    Notes from an affinity mapping exercise .

    Findings

    Account Creation
    • 4/5 participants found the process of entering a business address cumbersome and wanted an autofill. 
    • 1 participant validated my concern about our password creation process not being ADA compliant for color blind users.
    Navigation:
    • 5/5 participants were easily able to navigate to the app settings without friction.
    • 5/5 participants did not know that the navigation label “Payments” meant invoicing and quotes.
    • 5/5 participants could easily find and navigate to the app. (except for finding the invoices screen)
    Business Goals:
    • Participants who were not linking a bank account were confused by the goal affirmation screen.
    • 4/5 participants expected to be taken inside the app with some kind of action item list.
      - “I thought it would give me action items inside the apps.”
    Dashboard:
    • 5/5 Participants did not know that widgets with $0 meant they needed to connect a bank account.
    • 5/5 participants said they felt like this was a banking app and not an insights app.
    Overall Impressions:
    • 5/5 Participants said they felt like this was a banking app.

    Recommendations

    The Product Manager Director and I took these findings to the rest of the team and discussed these recommendations:
      • Update the password requirements to be ADA compliant.
      • Implement address autofill for the business profile.
      • Change the navigation label “Payments” to something more intuitive.
      • Explore the idea of adding a goal checklist.
      • Redesign or remove the business goal screen.
      • Change the empty states to not show $0
      • Rethink the dashboard and feel of the app. We want a financial insights app, not a banking app.

      Quick Updates

      Below are comparisons of the original designs on the left, to new designs on the right.
      iPhone displaying the card details page.
      Original
      Password Creation

      The password creation validation was not accessible to our color blind users. The red color indicates the user has not satisfied that requirement.

      iPhone displaying a Starbucks card details screen.
      New
      Password Creation

      I updated the password creation to be accessible to those that were color blind. The user no longer has to rely on color to indicate if they have met the requirements. Now the requirements go away as the user completes them.

      iPhone displaying a loading animation.
      Original
      Navigation Label

      No participants were able to find how to create and send an invoice from the navigation. The navigation label said “Payments”  and all participants thought this was for making loan payments or paying bills.

      iPhone displaying a success message.
      New
      Navigation Label

      When I asked participants what they thought a better label would be, they all said “Invoices”, so this is what we changed it to.

      iPhone displaying a loading animation.
      Original
      Dashboard

      All participants felt like this was a banking app and not a financial insights app.

      iPhone displaying a success message.
      New
      Dashboard

      We updated the design to focus on cash flow and not business bank accounts.

      iPhone displaying a loading animation.
      Original
      Dashboard & Empty State

      All participants were not sure why there was a $0 and if that meant they needed to do something.

      iPhone displaying a success message.
      New
      Empty States

      We want users to see the value in connecting financial accounts with Lendio, so we changed the designs to show fake data that appears disabled. A larger button was also added to make it clear there is an action to take.

      iPhone displaying a loading animation.
      Original
      Onboarding Question

      All users found the business goal affirmation screens to be overwhelming. They said it was a lot of information to take in at once and was confusing

      iPhone displaying a success message.
      New
      Onboarding Question

      Instead of asking business goals questions, we’re showing a screen to prompt users to connect a business bank account to build their cash flow dashboard.

      Updated Designs


      Phone screens of the onboarding flow

      New Design Test Results

      To validate this new flow, I ran a usability test with 7 participants and found the following:
      • 7/7 participants said in similar ways that the this felt like a financial insights app.
      • 7/7 participants said the experience was easy to understand.
      • 7/7 participants understood that linking bank accounts will provide financial insights.
      • 7/7 participants gave positive feedback about their experience.

      ”...I think this could be a very useful tool for a business to use when starting out to track expenses vs income to make sure you aren't spending too much.”

      “It was very easy and user friendly. The directions were easy to follow. The interface is also very easy to read.”

      Next Steps

      Our goal is to increase our active users by 10% by June, 2023, so we will be monitoring to see if this new experience starts to reach that goal. We'll also be doing more research into our data visualization charts to see if small business owners find them helpful enough to keep using the Lendio mobile app.
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