Marcus (Goldman Sachs)

I supported in the development of Marcus’ consumer platform as a Senior UX Designer. My focus was primarily in the Consumer Savings vertical, but I played roles across the organization as well.

I joined Marcus (Goldman Sachs) in February 2018 as a Senior UX Designer. In this role, I crafted end-to-end experiences for a variety of verticals: Consumer Savings, Consumer Lending, Consumer Checking, and Small Business Credit. Within these verticals, I would support my cross-functional partners on projects from end-to-end - whether it was observing an initial business opportunity to marketing a product release.

In each of the case studies below, I was the lead UX Designer, and I often collaborated with a diverse group of people like a UI Designer, UX Writer, Product Manager, and Engineering Lead/Engineers.

Case Study 1: Redesigning the Onboarding Flow

The company’s opportunity

Goldman Sach’s leadership was prepared to make a large investment into its new consumer division. The Deposits team (known for their high rates savings accounts) had a huge ambition to grow their deposits volume over the next few years.

My role and collaborators:

I led UX design activities and was accompanied by another designer responsible for the final delivery of the interface. Collaborated with a Product Manager and a UX Researcher to define the customer journey. Collaborated with an ENG scrum team to deliver the experience. Stakeholders involved senior leadership for the Consumer Savings vertical.

Aligning on “big bets” and a strategy to accomplish our business goals

Our analytics team informed us that there were several opportunities to improve the conversation rate of prospective Savings consumers. First, users converted on mobile at half the rate as compared to desktop. Moreover, there were moments through the funnel, a lengthy sign-up flow, where noticeable drop-off occurred. Thus, I was tasked to understand where users could have been more engaged through the journey and craft experiences to improve sign-up conversation rate.

Centering our conversations towards two key personas: “Optimizers” and “Pioneers”

Working with the Marketing and User Research teams, we narrowed our focus on two personas: ‘Optimizers’ and ‘Pioneers’. These two groups of users were most likely to engage with the Savings product (as opposed to other personas who were more geared towards other Marcus products like Personal Loans). With these personas in mind, we developed experiments to drive prototypes for.

We needed to educate Optimizers and Pioneers on the value of opening a Marcus Savings account

I collaborated with the Analytics team to understand current behaviors of the Account Creation flow. They informed me that the “click-through” rate of the primary CTA of the Savings Marketing Page was relatively high. Meanwhile, the scroll rate of the Savings Marketing Page was relatively low. Also, as users went through the current Account Opening flow, they were never educated on the benefits of opening the account. Thus, I hypothesized that users didn’t fully collect the value propositions of opening a Marcus Savings account.

Prototyping solutions that worked for our target personas

We found many opportunities to educate Optimizers and Pioneers towards the benefits of Marcus.

Outcomes informed by live A/B testing

As we delivered final designs, we batched rollouts for our rolled out the new designs in phases so that we could A/B test against the currently existing flow. The new designs clearly outperformed the control: ~18% increase in conversion on mobile and ~9% overall. In dollar terms, this amounted to nearly $700 million of new annual deposit volumes for the business. We attributed this large increase to improved ease-of-use and clear communication of the product’s value proposition.

Case Study 2: Digitizing the CD Maturity Process

Context and problem definition:

A Certificate of Deposit (CD) is a type of savings vehicle where money grows at a fixed rate over a pre-determined amount of time. When a CD matures, the owner of the CD can either retrieve their funds or renew the CD.

Prior to this project, Marcus customers had a 10-day window to manually call into the Contact Center in order to make updates to their maturing CDs. Many users missed this window, and they had their funds locked into their CDs as the system automatically renewed the CD. This was a major pain point for customers. For the business, this meant managing frustrated customers and also staffing people to work through these processes. There was a desire to digitize this experience.

Role and collaborators:

Led UX design activities and was accompanied by another designer responsible for the final delivery of the interface. Collaborated with a Product Manager, and UX Researcher. Stakeholders involved senior leadership for the Consumer Savings vertical.

Template of the one letter customers received ten days prior to their CD expiring - which frustrated many.

I drafted design principles rooted in solve customer pain points.

Crafting design principles rooted in solving pain points:

Prior to any work in my design tools, I actively listened to customers expressing their frustration with the manual renewal process. The UX Research team facilitated several interviews with customers. One customer said, “They make it extremely easy to put your money in their bank and extremely difficult to take your money out on a CD.” After consuming insights, I drafted design principles to address our customers’ pain points

Drafting divergent mocks to explore a variety of paths:

Customers were expressing a level of frustration and complexity from the experience. Thus, I wanted the design to do be opposite and bring value by being flexible, simple and transparent.

With these values in mind, I began drafting lower fidelity user journeys and prototypes to understand how an experience might bring value to our customers. I was able to socialize these mocks with various team members to allow for convergence towards stronger solutions.

Crafting lower-fidelity mocks to present a variety of ways a user could manage their maturing Certificate of Deposit.

Listening to the customer to intentionally design experiences:

After listening to 6 customers about the frustrations of the current experience, we identified three areas of focus for the designs: 1) educating the customer on their options; 2) keeping the content human-friendly and without jargon; and 3) making it easy to self-correct any potential errors made. We spent a considerable amount of time refining the content and interactions on the screen to meet these priorities.

Design activities focused on clearly educating customers and allowing users to self-correct given any potential errors.

Making the highest anxiety moment as simple as possible:

The highest anxiety interaction in the user journey was when a user wanted or needed to make updates to their CD. As an example, a user might want to change the term length of a CD from 3 to 5 years, or they might want to increase the amount of to invest from $10,000 to $20,000. Considering that this was a “key moment” for the user, I invested more time on prototyping, validating, and iterating here than on other moments. When we performed a usability test with tasks explicitly focused on renewing a CD with updates, all of our participants performed at a 100% success rate. Months later, when the initiative was launched to customers, the team saw a significant increase in satifisfaction with updating their CD.

High-anxiety moments provided an opportunity to be crystal clear on content and interactions.

We allowed customers to easily manage their CD product (such as withdrawing funds), even if it meant “hurting” the team’s financial KPIs.

Mapping out the entire user journey for implementation:

Results:

Aside from the increase in satisfaction from customers, the Call Center team witnessed a 6% reduction of daily call volume and a 8% reduction in back-office case loads for the Savings vertical. Since the Certificate of Deposit was one of the few products offered by Marcus, this large reduction made sense. Moreover, the internal product team was exceptionally happy with the outcome; one senior engineer even remarked that he was “incredibly proud that Marcus was able to release a market-defining feature”. That made me proud!

Mobile App Prototypes

I created several prototypes to inform the mobile app experience users see today. I’ve hosted workshops at both Chase and Goldman to teach other designers best practices for these tools.

Mobile app prototype for a Marcus Savings customer.

Brand Partnerships

I supported the Brand Partnerships team to help imagine how Marcus could extend their consumer finance experiences into other ecosystems. Below are a couple concepts presented to explore the intersection between Marcus and popular brands.