Cash Flow Insight

Helping small business owners understand their cash flow

ROLE

Lead UX Designer

TIMELINE

2017-2019

PROJECT SKILLS

E2E Design, Data visualization, Multi-channel design

01 - OVERVIEW

Cash Flow Insight is a suite of tools for small business owners within online banking to view and manage their business’s cash flow. This was a 2007 IDEO project written in a now, outdated language in a legacy platform.

Over 2 years, I worked as the sole and lead designer on the PNC Bank small business team. As we were overhauling and modernizing the entire PNC website to a modern, responsive design system, our team used this opportunity to also redesign our Cash Flow Insight tool to be more usable and intuitive. 

IMPACT

I delivered and supported development of end-to-end redesign of this legacy product into a responsive, user-centric experience with a modern design system. While users struggled to navigate the legacy app, 100% of research participants successfully completed key tasks within the redesign. Due to delays in the overall portal redesign, I did not see the usage metrics from the launch.

02 - USERS

The small business owner is a very busy person who, in the US, averages at around 60 years old. They are constantly on the go, but monitor a very tight ship on their finances.

FINANCIAL BEHAVIOR

Those using our product should find a sense of peace seeing a holistic view of their past and future cash flow.

Why are they still frustrated and anxious?

03 - PROBLEM

“I don’t have time to figure out how these complex graphs work”

-NPS verbatim

The current Cash Flow Insight experience was:

Confusing

Complex

Not fit for who our users are

QUANTIFYING THE PROBLEM
04 - OUR GOAL

By creating a better, more personalized experience where users gain value, we can focus on growth:

  • Increase usage (power-users)   →  loyalty

  • Increase number of customers 

BUSINESS GOAL
05 - SOLUTION

I redesigned Cash Flow Insight to be more usable and overhauled the legacy app into a new, modern design system so that the features not only worked on desktop, but also on mobile devices.

The entire product was redesigned, but for the sake of the case study, I will only showcase the Spend Analysis feature.

SPEND ANALYSIS
07 - IDEATION
06 - DISCOVERY

I gathered research, feedback, and data from a lot of different sources to gain a holistic perspective on how we should move forward.

As a team, including 2 PMs, our developer team, and a business analyst, we mapped out and ideated on what the ideal state of this experience should be.

08 - INTERIM LEGACY, ANALYTICS-DRIVEN MVP

As a short-term solution, we redesigned the legacy dashboard using analytics to prioritize features and information that customers use most often.

OLD

NEW

09 - REDESIGN SOLUTION

The redesigned solution was more simple, intuitive, and user-centered

  1. MORE SIMPLIFIED WORKFLOW
2. OPTIMIZED CHANNELS FOR ON-THE-GO
3. MORE DIGESTIBLE VISUALIZATIONS & MORE ACCESSIBLE DESIGN 
10 - VALIDATION RESEARCH

100%

of participants
successfully completed our tasks

90%

of participants would use this app in their day-to-day

“Who knew that banking could be this simple! If I had this app, I’d be checking it multiple times a day”

11 - IMPLEMENTATION

I worked closely with dev on implementing & giving feedback on designs on his  local. A challenge was getting the animation and interactions of charts right in D3 since the technical constraints held back what we could do.

12 - LOOKING BACK

If I had more time, I would have tried to do more validation towards our business and user goals. 

TAKEAWAYS

  1. End-to-end exploration of the design process 

  2. Used UX to support/ guide business decisions

  3. Created a user-centered & data-driven feedback cadence