Empowering Financial Confidence:
Designing Equifax's Mobile App Vision
This project aimed to craft a compelling vision for Equifax's mobile app in collaboration with a partner vendor. Using a customer-centric approach, we addressed the needs of users seeking to improve their credit and achieve significant financial milestones, such as purchasing a home or car. By employing the working backward methodology, we uncovered key user pain points and opportunities, leading to a strategic roadmap and a cohesive design system. The result was a prototype and vision that aligned stakeholders, fostered organizational trust, and laid the foundation for a scalable, impactful mobile experience focused on empowering users to make informed financial decisions with confidence.
CLIENT
Discovery Phase: Building a Customer-Centric Foundation
Overview:
To break away from past approaches, we used a working backward methodology, focusing first on understanding the end customer. This involved identifying their pain points, financial goals, and motivations to ensure the product vision would resonate with real-world needs.
Problem:
Equifax’s mobile app users often struggle with managing their credit and making informed decisions for life events like purchasing a house, car, or funding home renovations.
Solutions:
Through a two-day workshop, we:
Identified customer personas and mapped their journeys.
Highlighted key pain points, such as the stress of understanding credit scores and the lack of tools to visualize financial decision outcomes.
Built a foundation for a product vision and storyboard.
Main Takeaways:
The workshop culminated in a high-level product vision:
“Empower users to confidently achieve their financial goals by providing tailored guidance, insights, and tools to improve their credit and make informed decisions for major life milestones.”
My Role:
I built a relationship with our vendor partner to help facilitate the workshop, ensure alignment across teams, and synthesize findings into a clear, actionable vision.
Ideation Phase: Crafting the Strategy
Overview:
Using insights from the discovery phase, we developed a comprehensive strategy focused on engaging paid users. These users represented the most active and motivated customer segment, with the potential for cross-sell opportunities.
Strategy Statement:
Our strategy was to prioritize high value users by:
Educating them on how everyday financial decisions contribute to their long-term goals.
Providing personalized guidance for major life decisions, such as buying a home or car, with tools to forecast the financial impact of different scenarios.
Creating a clear, actionable roadmap for credit improvement and goal achievement.
Roadmap Prioritization:
Focus on features that build trust and empower users, such as real-time credit monitoring and goal-setting tools.
Incorporate decision-path simulations for transparency and confidence.
My Role:
I collaborated with Equifax on defining the product strategy and roadmap, balancing user needs with business goals to ensure feasibility and scalability.
Design Phase: Bringing the Vision to Life
Overview:
Equifax’s current marketing lacked a cohesive design identity. We addressed this by crafting a consumer-focused visual language and prototyping key moments in the customer journey to align stakeholders and guide the development process.
Problem:
Existing designs felt overly corporate, potentially alienating consumers who needed an approachable and supportive tone. Additionally, technical and organizational constraints required a design that could be implemented iteratively while maintaining fidelity to the vision.
Solutions:
Developed a creative direction emphasizing clarity, encouragement, and trustworthiness. This included a clean, lighthearted design style with strong hierarchy to engage users without overwhelming them.
Created a prototype to illustrate critical hero moments, such as onboarding, credit tracking, and planning for major life decisions.
Partnered with multidisciplinary teams to ensure seamless integration of the creative vision into implementation plans.
Delivered comprehensive documentation, including user flows, requirements, and a backlog, to support the development process.
My Role:
I guided the creative vision and prototyping process, aligning internal stakeholders and the design team. I also ensured that implementation planning adhered to the strategic vision while remaining flexible for future growth.
Learn Phase: Measuring Success
Overview:
While implementation is ongoing, the prototype and vision have already proven successful in aligning stakeholders and gaining organizational buy-in.
Key Learnings:
Starting with the customer through the working backward method ensured a grounded and impactful vision.
Collaboration with the vendor was crucial to overcoming organizational skepticism and fostering trust.
Prototyping early enabled stakeholders to visualize the product’s potential and reduced resistance to change.
