Round-up Saver

Role
Content Designer · UX Writer

Team
Techcombank
Savings & Investment

Year
2022

Status
Concept only

Overview

“What if you could save by spending?” was the question we posed to ourselves, and later on to our users, as we worked on this project.

Round-up Saver offers just that – the ability to save while spending, and save by spending. Every time you make a payment, it automatically rounds the amount up to the nearest 10.000 VND to deduct from your account. Your payment goes through as usual, while your spare change will move into a Savings Goal to build up your savings over time – as simple as pennies filling up a jar.

How I helped

Content design for onboarding and product explanation
UX writing for set up, use, and manage flows
Copywriting for entry points

Challenge

I mentioned it being simple. Actual execution proved to be not as simple as we’d imagined. We’d approached it as a regular product, with a regular static product page explaining everything there was to know about it. But this product was anything but regular.

We had anticipated that this was a completely new concept in the market, so the majority of the cognitive load would be on the product explanation itself. We just hadn’t realised the full implication of this novelty on the comprehension process.

Original onboarding copy:

Concept testing and preliminary usability testing showed that users struggled to understand virtually everything related to this product: how it works, which part of the money is going where, where the money is coming from, what the whole scheme is for.

The more we explained, the less was understood.

Approach

Moving away from the traditional approach of landing-page style information dumping, I changed my direction to look for ways to both lessen the cognitive load and increase contextual relevance.

To lessen the cognitive load, I reframed the explanation from theoretical mechanism to practical example. This play-through method works for low-risk, high-complexity products, as we discovered through testing that when something seems too complex, users tended to just want to dive in straight away and see how it goes, provided the risks/implications are not too significant.

With this, phrasing was shortened and terminologies simplified to focus on getting 1 main idea across:

To increase relevance, we had to find ways to weave this explanation into the main action itself and look for more contextual entry points. Instead of selling this feature as a separate product, it was crucial to let our users see it in action, how it works seamlessly and simply as an add-on to their everyday banking activities:

Iterate and re-iterate

Revision 1:

Following the new approach, this version was focused on riding on the high of a just-completed transaction. However, technical constraints limited us from recognising and utilising these real-time transaction data.

Revision 2:

To make up for these technical constraints, I switched to a hybrid approach: still leveraging the end point of a completed transaction, but with more static information and explanation.

This version was not working either, as testing showed that adding even a little bit of description underneath significantly reduced motivation and comprehensibility.

The final result

These most recent findings reaffirmed our belief that for a savings tool like Round-up Saver, it should be – first and foremost – simple. And then it should be fun.

There was no working around the technical limitation, so I decided to go with an imagined scenario – and stick to it. This was the main focus and the main hook of the onboarding process. Once our users were sufficiently interested and could see the relevance, further information could then be revealed for consideration.

For most of the users that we tested with, this simplified play-through scenario was enough to get their buy-in, especially considering this was a low-effort and low-risk product.

For others with more concerns, we also provided a more traditional product page with detailed information and frequently asked questions in case they require more to make their decision.

Unfortunately, due to changes in the product roadmap, this feature is still in the backlog for future development.