Betterment Prospect Quiz

Betterment | Growth Product Team | 2021

 

Overview

 

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 prospects—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 confusion, finding ways to communicate our value to prospects pre-signup was a priority. We decided to meet that goal by launching our Life Goals quiz—an interactive way of engaging with users.

 

Impact

 

To discuss with Jaime:
What did sign-ups initiated look like?
What did we learn about prospects?
How are we using the learnings?

 

My role

 

As the Product Design Lead, I lead the project from concept to launch creating the end-to-end user experience. I lead research, concept development, quiz copy development, visual design, assisted in writing quiz code logic, prototyping, and stakeholder discussions. Cross-functional partners included the Financial Advisor Team, Marketing, Engineering, and Brand Creative.

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

Prospect opportunity

 

  • Improve our user experience by offering a tool that will produce to a personalized outcome.

  • Provide value to the user pre signup.

  • Educate users about goal based investing, early.

 

Business opportunity

 

  • Increase sign-ups initiated.

  • Learn about our prospects. Collect data about them and their expectations, so we can provide a better sign up experience.

 

Hypothesis

 

Providing prospects with a personalized recommendation will lead to an increase in signups initiated.

 

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:

  • their current status

  • do they have debt (and what kind)

  • do they have an emergency fund

  • their short-term plans and long-term goals

Desktop

 

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. [ ADD a comment about having all of our data/analytics in 1 place ]

 

Mobile web

 

Research

 

What data can help us?

We looked to the data on our previous, albeit long retired, mad lib-style quiz—the rate of interactions and signups initiated were strong. Quizzes work, folks like interacting with them.

We also wanted to understand the numbers on our website’s highest traffic and best converting pages. Our homepage was high traffic but low converting. We felt this was an indicator its ripe for content

 

Where could quizzes live?

We started to map and prioritize

 

Who is our best audience?

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world.

 

 Writing the quiz

 
 

We decided to model our quiz off of the Betterment Certified Financial Advisor financial advice intro call. By consulting with our experts—we ensured the sequence, language, and outcome recommendations sat in-line with their proven structure.

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

 
 

Impact & learnings

 

Statement to come—something punchy about the impact of the quiz, nothing super long.

 

1

We created an arsenal of future tests. The ideating part of the process uncovered a swath of ideas, location, and learning opportunities.

2

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3

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What I’d do differently

 

Scale back 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 outcome. Engineering aid became a blocker and slowed us down.

 

We had to accept that a piece 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 of capturing 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 Nanager
Nick Kroetz Design Manager
Ken Yang Engineering
Kim Pham Brand Designer, illustrations
Cory Tallman Copy writer