Marcus is the digital consumer bank Goldman Sachs and, I led design for Consumer Savings.

In this role, I was responsible for end-to-end experiences for Consumer Savings: marketing pages, account creation, account management, and even customer support tools. I also contributed to Consumer Lending and Small Business Credit. My contributions supported the business in $55B+ in deposits account volume growth (100% increase after 3 years). 

Case Study

Onboarding Redesign

My role

  • Shaped journey to meet needs of target personas

  • Prototyped divergent concepts to aid product discovery

  • Delivered experiences for desktop, tablet, and mobile

Impact

  • +115% year-over-year increase in account creation rate

  • Initiative contributed to +$55B in deposits volume growth

Flawed onboarding experience tampering ambitions

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.

However, the existing end-to-end experience was anchored to a legacy design - and it was failing to meet user and business needs. The current experience had an account creation rate of only 12% and account funding rate of only 55%.

Anchoring design on key personas

Working with UXR and Marketing, 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.

Prototyping solutions

After listening to their needs in foundational UXR sessions, I found opportunities to educate Optimizers and Pioneers towards the benefits of Marcus. I focused on building out experiences that anchored on key value props (i.e., high APY, no fees), a simple account linking/funding journey, and reinforcing customer support services.

Delivering a solution for impact

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: 115% YOY increase in conversion. We attributed this large increase to improved ease-of-use and clear communication of the product’s value proposition.

Case Study: Digitizing the CD Maturity Process

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 Certificate of Deposits. Many users missed this window, and they had their funds locked into their CDs as the system automatically renewed the CD. 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.

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 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.

Crafting design principles

I actively listened to customers expressing their frustration with the manual renewal process. 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

Empathizing with customer pain points

After listening to customers about the frustrations of the current experience, I 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.

Impact

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!