The Problem

A 'Personal Loan' product already existed on the Backbase banking platform, however it was not sufficient enough to handle 'Auto Loans', both technically and from a user experience point of view. Conversion was almost non-existent.

The challenge was to re-use as much of the technical foundations of the existing 'Personal Loans' flow, but to enhance the experience and increase the conversion of auto loans being processed.

Buying a vehicle is one of the largest purchases a customer makes, so the experience needed to acknowledge and reflect this.

Customers were getting frustrated and intimidated by the long process so ended up churning.

What Does Success Look Like?

Core Metric = Number of Auto Loan Applications Completed
‍Increase Auto Loan applications by 90%

Quantitative & Qualitative Research

Data Analysis

Requesting Vehicle Details Too Early
Looking at the existing data, it was clear to see where customers were dropping off. Asking customers for detailed information about a vehicle (which they might not have or may not even have a particular vehicle in mind yet) at an early stage of the flow was causing a lot of churn.

Time Consuming Flow
For customers who made it past the 'Vehicle Details' stage, they would soon drop off when realising how much additional information was required and how long the process was. 

It was clear to see that customers weren't making it much further than the 'Vehicle Details' step.

Inspection and Intuition

Looking at the existing flow, it was clear to see some of the main pain points for the majority of customers. It required complex information such as a 'VIN' which a lot of customers did not have to hand and did not tap in to the emotional side of purchasing a vehicle online.

Talking to customers who had previously applied for an Auto Loan helped us to understand the full end-to-end experience and common pain points. This helped to form our target persona, 'Randy'.

Design

Design System Enhancements

With a well established design system in place, I was able to use a lot of existing components to start shaping the product. However, I wasn't happy with the amount of effort customers were having to put in to the application, including many unnecessary steps and clicks/taps. This led me to explore additional components that would improve usability and speed up the process. The existing flow used a lot of 'drop down' components, which were not necessary for fields that only had a small amount of options. For example 'Loan Term' and 'Yes/No' options.

I wanted to introduce a 'select box' UI, which would display all available options (to give quick visibility/context) and make it easy to select different values with a single tap/click.

Aligning Mental Models

Understanding the common thought processes that customers were experiencing, I wanted to match this in the interface. An example common mental model for the initial exploration of an Auto Loan concluded as 'Loan Amount > Loan Term > Credit Score > Loan Summary'.

Refined Loan Calculator

The existing calculator lacked visual hierarchy and customers found the results confusing. It made sense to improve the quality of the calculator at this point to compliment the new flow.

The 'Loan Summary' needed particular attention. My solution was to redesign the component to be reusable across multiple products within the business. This meant the component needed to be configurable, depending on where and when it would be used. The final solution included a 'Fully Populated' version, which used primary, secondary and tertiary headings, icons, graphs and all available data fields. This 'Fully Populated' component could then be configured and reduced when necessary. This proved to be very useful for the business, saving time building new flows and increasing consistency accross products within the business.

Tapping In To Emotions

Buying a vehicle is often a very emotional experience and can be one of the largest life purchases customer's make. Acknowledging this fact, I wanted to use imagery to tap in to the emotions of customers and make the experience more enjoyable. The assumption I validated was that being able to picture the end result of an auto loan (the vehicle) would increase motivation to complete the flow and in turn increase conversion.

If a customer had a specific vehicle in mind, I wanted to show the vehicle during the process to build excitement and motivation whilst completing the flow. For customers that did not have a specific vehicle in mind, using a 'covered vehicle' image would achieve a similar effect, with a mystery aspect included.

Allowing Save & Exit

To initially address the problem of customers dropping out of the flow due to the length and time it took to complete, a 'Save & Exit' concept was introduced. This would essentially allow customers to save their progress and return at a later date, including after they had been pre-approved and needed to go car shopping before continuing with the full application. The assumption was if a customer knew they could save and resume at a later date, returning to the flow would be less intimidating, compared to having to start again from scratch. It also provided an opportunity to prompt customers to return to the product after a period of time.

Smooth Integration With Existing Flow

With an existing 'Personal Loans' flow already in place, it was important to re-use as much of the technical setup as possible to save time and resources. The aim was to integrate the new and improved 'Auto Loan' steps with the existing 'Personal Loan' steps (e.g. Personal Details, SSN etc). It was important to maintain consistency to create a smooth and seamless flow.  

Reducing Steps & Intimidation

Combining the new 'Auto Loan' and existing 'Personal Loan' flows still encountered the same issue of having many steps, which would continue to be intimidating for customers. I was keen to reduce these steps, or at least the appearance of how many steps there were. To do this I hosted workshop to 'reduce and combine' the existing steps. Removing unnecessary steps, re-ordering certain steps and finally combining steps when appropriate. This resulted in a huge reduction of visible steps for customers. From 12 to just 4.  

Taking the current flow and reducing/combining the steps to simplify the product.

Testing & Rollout

Once we were confident with the designs, it was time to get them in front of customers for feedback. A mixture of usability tests and customer interviews helped to validate and uncover issues with the proposed new design.

After some swift iterations, we were ready to start building the live product. Throughout every stage of development, testing played a pivotal role in the success of the new flow. After a few rounds of testing and iterating, we were confident in ramping up the audience we released to.

The overall outcome included a brand new 'Auto Loans' product for the business to sell to Financial Institutions, which converted successfully.   

Business Impact