How do we engage prospects who are interested in investing but may be nervous about getting started?

Betterment Life Goals Quiz

Web & Mobile web     Growth Product Team     2021

Betterment is an automated investing service grounded in the idea of “goal based investing.” Meaning, we encourage users to set up accounts based on their goals in life.

However, we know 2 things to be consistently true about our user base—folks are confused by the concept of “goal based investing,” and they are nervous about signing up.

As a member of the Growth Team, in addition to dispelling the above, finding ways to communicate our value to prospects pre-signup was a priority. We decided to employ a tactic that had performed well historically: engage users with an interactive quiz complete with a personalized recommendation. And, we narrowed in on a part of our homepage that the least amount of visitors make it to—the bottom of the page.

Impact

Sign-ups initiated increased by 21%.

The quiz is now the 2nd most trafficked page.

Overview

My role

As the sole UI/UX designer, I lead the project from concept to launch.

I lead research, concept development, quiz copy development, visual design, prototyping, and stakeholder discussions, and helped with writing quiz code logic. Cross-functional partners included the Financial Advisor Team, Marketing, Engineering, and Brand Creative.

what we are trying to accomplish

Opportunity & hypothesis

  • Improve our homepage user experience by offering a tool that produces a personalized outcome.

  • Provide value to the user pre-signup.

  • Educate users about goal based investing, early.

Prospect opportunity

  • Increase sign-ups initiated.

  • Learn about our prospects. Understand who they are and their expectations, so we can provide a better sign up experience.

Business opportunity

We can potentially convert prospects by focusing on a lower-trafficked area of our homepage with an interactive tool.

Hypothesis

RESEARCH

Data supporting the work

Understanding our target audience

Using Hotjar (a heatmap analytics tool) we could see that only 25% of visitors were making it to the bottom of the Homepage—this was our target audience to reach.

Our hypothesis was that if a prospect is willing to spend their time engaging with our homepage content, making it all the way down to the bottom of the page—that’s reason to believe these are qualified leads. We bet that they’d be willing to engage with an interactive piece of content.

25% of visitors made it to the bottom

Pages to pay attention to—high converting, high traffic

We looked to the data on our previous, albeit long retired, “mad lib-style” quiz, and we saw that the rate of interactions and signups initiated were strong. Quizzes attract users and folks like interacting with them.

We also wanted to understand the data around our website’s highest traffic and best converting pages. Our homepage was high traffic but low converting, we felt this was an indicator that it was ready for new content and would make a great first test location.

We started to map out and strategize what areas of our website we should hone-in on. This helped us with next steps of concepting our actual quiz ideas.

Understanding user-intent paths

It was important to understand where our users are coming from and what are their intents once they land on our website. Again, this gave us an indication of areas that are prime for interactive quiz pieces.

For example, we know that Prospects visiting our site via Social and Paid Ads are our best converting audience, and they typically visit our Blog and Resource Center articles.

writing the quiz

We consulted our experts

We brainstormed many concept options during the Discovery phase. We ultimately decided to model our quiz off of our Betterment Certified Financial Advisor financial advice intro call—an internal framework that we constantly reference.

By consulting with our own in-house financial experts, we ensured the sequence, language, and outcome recommendations that our quiz-takers would receive sat in-line with their proven structure.

This decision allowed us to bring the expert-quality recommendations that we provide to our customers, to our prospects as well.

solution

The Life Goals Quiz

After extensive research and concept ideation, we narrowed in on a 6-question quiz that asks a user about their life goals. We ask users:

  • what is their current status?

  • do they have debt? (and what kind)

  • do they have an emergency fund?

  • what are their short-term plans and long-term goals?


After answering the 6 questions, the user then receives a personalized recommendation. The recommendation describes where they should focus their next move and how they can take the next step with Betterment. The recommendation options include:

  • Tackle high-interest debt

  • Build an emergency fund

  • Make a plan for your retirement

  • Ensure your retirement income is well-set

We published the quiz on our Homepage using Outgrow, a 3rd party low-code quiz tool. Without having to build from the ground up, it allowed us to avoid investing in extensive engineering time.

 

Desktop web

 

Mobile web

the 4 recommendations

FeatureS

Meet folks where they’re at

Inclusive categories

While writing the quiz, making sure our answer options felt inclusive and wide-reaching was a priority. We needed to consider a broad spectrum of needs.

Tone: financial therapy

Be as human as possible. We decided early on that we wanted to communicate in a very human, financial therapy kind of way.

Recommendations

Straight from the mouths of our experts. We designed the quiz to reflect how our team of financial planners advise our customers.

Impact

We increased sign-ups initiated by 21%.

The quiz is now the 2nd highest-trafficked web page.

The success and learnings of this test lead to leadership buy-in to support an even riskier swing.

We used these learnings to make even riskier bets— the team went on to create a follow-up quiz with actual human interaction, more risky and more costly. We created influence by taking initiative.

Learnings

Friction doesn’t always deter users.

It’s a risk to place anything in front of a ‘Get started’ CTA and we proved that it's okay. Prospects will increase their engagement with our site when we make engaging content. We learned that prospects won’t fall off if we combine friction with enticing engaging content.


Every company struggles to convert more users, we learned that you need to treat audiences differently.

We need to use different strategies to reach different types of customers.


We created an arsenal of future tests.

The initial ideation part of the process produced a swath of ideas, locations, and learning opportunities for future tests.

What I’d do differently

Scale back the complexity of the “if/then” code logic

Looking back, I would have advocated for a less complex quiz for the initial launch. As the quiz concept developed, so did our enthusiasm. We wanted to release the best possible MVP, and this meant a more complex logic system to give our quiz takers the best possible recommendation. Engineering aid became a blocker and slowed us down.


We had to accept that a segment of the user experience would be less than stellar

Due to limited engineering resources, we accepted early on that our initial launch would not include the ability to capture the results of the user’s outcome. Meaning, should the user decide to choose “Get started” on their Outcome screen—we would not be able to send them and their results into a smart, informed signup flow. This is the ideal user experience that we would prioritize for future iterations.

Credits

Carli Dottore Product Design Lead
Jamie Cartwright Product Manager
Ken Yang Engineering
Kim Pham Brand Designer, illustrations
Cory Tallman Copy polisher