HayStacks
Customisable sub–accounts
Shaype’s retail bank offering Hay, launched its beta version in early 2020, after which we continued to measure user experience and sentiment to define wants and needs with our early adopters. Their feedback clearly indicated that a savings functionality was one of the most requested features.
My role was within the core design/product team consisting of a UX designer focusing on the research initiating the project, and myself for design and assisting early research. The second part of this project involved rolling out a major promotion for the launch, where I art directed and produced the two-month long campaign.
APR 2021 – JUL 2021
IOS & ANDROID
TARGET AUDIENCE
To better understand our user groups and how some of their challenges and priorities had transformed during the pandemic, I investigated recent consumer spending habits and trends through secondary research, as well as analysing our own customers spending data.
This research guided us in redefining our personas for future features and gave us an idea of how we might expect our customers household saving and spending to unfold in the upcoming year.
PROBLEM
After looking at existing savings features offered from both big banks and other fintechs, we summarised their uniqueness and complexity as well as harnessing customer reviews and insights on these features.
Based on our research into consumer requirements and the competitive landscape, our problem statement lay within the challenge of creating a savings feature that met the customers expectations, to improve retention rates – despite licence restrictions and not having the ability to provide interest rate returns.
How might we...
design a Hay savings experience that provides the utility expected and enhances user stickiness.
So that...
Hay users are motivated to save using the
Hay savings feature.
IDEATION AND DESIGN APPROACH
To help us with direction and ideation around our own feature, we looked at our brands guiding principles and personality and discussed positioning in relation to our competitors, based on the progressive/traditional and simple/complex traits interpreted from the information at hand.
GUIDING BRAND PRINCIPLES
INSPIRATION
SIMPLICITY
TRUTH
TRADITIONAL
PROGRESSIVE/
UNIQUE
COMPLEX/
COMPREHENSIVE
SIMPLE
INSIGHT
The team discussion led into what features to prioritise to fulfil business goals and what was plausible for an MVP.
It became apparent that a personalised image categorisation would be a highly valued functionality with customers that could motivate them to save using the function, as well as setting a target to incentivise progress.
WIREFRAMES WITH
IMAGE PERSONALISATION
LIMITATIONS AND PRIORITIES
After successfully testing wireframes with desired functionalities, I started building the high-fidelity screens and prototype. The new feature would result in a major app update from beta to V1.0.
That meant that several screens including the main navigation would also need to be re-designed.
Working closer with our development team, we realised some limitations in time resource – which resulted changing the goals for the MVP release, and park the frequency saving-functionality to a later version release.
However, the personalised image categorisation was necessary for the first release to fulfil our problem statement. We needed to find a way to simplify the build of this feature but also keep the value for customers.
ORIGINAL MAIN NAVIGATION
NEW MAIN NAVIGATION DESIGN
HIGH FIDELITY SCREENS
OF FREQUENCY STEP
BEFORE ITERATION
DESIGN SOLUTION
By looking at earlier research and user data I ideated and narrowed down what saving categories would be most relevant for our user groups. The categories needed to be both aspirational but stay realistic to cover the practicalities of everyday life for our customers.
Since photography was a big part of the brands visual identity on social media and in marketing, used to reinforce brand values and showing what the ‘Hay life’ looks like, I saw the opportunity to introduce this within the HayStacks UI, opposed to using icons.
CUSTOMISABLE SUB–ACCOUNTS
The outcome was a saving feature where our users could set aside money from their transaction account, customisable with name, target amount and a selection of images, free for the user to interpret.
This was also a great way to let our brand identity shine through, for a unique brand experience.
Part two
Launch campaign
ART DIRECTION
The second part of this project involved rolling out a major promotion for the launch, where I art directed and produced the two-month long campaign.
The art direction of the campaign evolved from the idea of celebrating the 1 year anniversary of launching the beta-app, while focusing on our users and their commitment and help throughout the continuous development of the app.
CAMPAIGN LINE
1 year of making Hay
“It’s Hay’s 1st birthday and we are thrilled to celebrate it with you and look back at the year that’s been. Memories, achievements, finances brought into your control and a few lol’s – It was the first year of changing the old world of money into something that works for us.”
ROLL OUT
The campaign was rolled out on across all touch points such as in-app, email communication, app-stores with full take over on social media and website.
Set to drive new sign-ups and referrals from existing customers, the two month long campaign consisted of diverse types of assets which I ideated and produced, with key assets being a number of animations throughout the campaign.
CONCLUSION AND LEARNINGS
We launched the major update of the Hay app which included BPAY, and introduced the sub-accounts feature HayStacks, after a successful staged release with a group of our early adopters.
Our campaign creatives resonated in market, driving awareness and interest through impressions and video views – Conversation to onboard went up by a massive 36%, and referrals rose with 33% during the launch campaign.
My most valuable learning from working on this project was the importance of cross team communication and transparency even at very early stages of projects.