User Research

What do you get when you put a few product designers, a behavioral economist, a business analyst, and a user researcher in a room? Lightbulbs (is that the joke?)

For a full day, we held a remote research session with six real users on their experiences with Cinch. It led to new ideas, revelations, and many validations. Two of our participants couldn’t make it.

The Participants

• We conducted the study with six men of different races and locations
• Three of the participants had irregular income or were gig workers
• Ages 20 - 40
• One undergrad student, one engineer about to go to grad school, one physician assistant, one gig worker, one data scientist, and one business owner

Study Goals

1. Illuminate areas of confusion around features, specifically in Spending, such as Pocket Money, Safety Net and monthly contributions, and Goals
2. Find pain points and see how users were interacting with different parts of the app

The Takeaways

• Spending dashboard needed to be improved to become more of a configurator where users could adjust the information as needed. At the moment, we gave users limited interaction with the components of spending, and it was causing some inaccuracies.
• Credit card debt and repayment of it shouldn’t be in Safety Net/Savings, it should be in bills. Users’ mental model around credit card payments was not money being put aside, but rather, active and recurring payments each month.
• Safety Net as the section name was not quite working. Like the Spending dashboard, it needed a revamp and improvement, as well as the capability for editing and more user interaction/input.
• Goals was an area for untapped potential. Users were not using it, but would if it had more value.
• Snapshot held great value as a centralized hub, and that overall, comprehensive look at financial health was important to users. In addition, the end of month review was incredibly useful. The only thing that was lacking was more insight into what that snapshot meant—trends, analysis, behaviors, etc.

The work was split up and distributed appropriately among the different tracks. I personally worked on improving the Spending dashboard and bills, incorporating the end of month review in Snapshot, and fleshing out Goals.