Lendio Mobile 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.

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.

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.

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.
Updating empty states on the dashboard to not have $0.

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.

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.

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.

Original
Empty State

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

New
Empty State

I updated the designs to have fake data, but appear to be disabled. I also made the call to action a bigger button to show the user what to do next.

New Onboarding

Research showed that all participants found the business goals area of the onboarding process overwhelming, and they weren’t sure what they were doing. I wanted to simplify this process while also showing users the value in connecting financial accounts to the mobile app. This whole flow needed to be rethought.

We decided to remove the business goals completely from onboarding. Now when a user links a bank account, we load in the data immediately and ask them if they want to connect other financial account.

Test Results

To validate this new flow, I ran a usability test with 7 participants and found the following:

7/7 participants said the experience was easy to understand.
7/7 participants understood that linking 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.