Upsolve: Restructuring An Information Architecture
Timeline
Oct - Nov 2024 (5 weeks)
Oct - Nov 2024 (5 weeks)
Discipline
UX Research, Mobile & Web Product Design, Information Architecture Design
UX Research, Mobile & Web Product Design, Information Architecture Design
For
Upsolve
Upsolve
Tools
Figma
Hotjar
Figma
Hotjar
Who is...
Upsolve is a nonprofit digital platform that provides free debt-relief tools to help anyone with low income or who are experiencing financial hardship. Upsolve is dedicated to helping anyone negotiate their debt or file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. So far, they are the only platform that does this in the U.S.!
What Was This Project All About?
With a team of 4 other product designers, we joined Upsolve to help address their users' needs. We met on a weekly cadence to establish project goals and roadmap alignments.
User Goals:
- Minimize user confusion about the appropriate category for their debt
- Help users ensure they've listed all their debts
- Make the data entry process as quick as possible
Business Goals:
- Increase user completion percentage of the 'Debts & Creditors' onboarding section
- Maintain onboarding accuracy rate, while minimizing user input confusion.
Design Methodology
The Tried and True
Yes, we followed the Double Diamond framework! This approach greatly helped us discover and define our largest issues to tackle for users to lead us into our design solutions. While we had many constraints; the layout of the site design is hardcoded, we are working within one section of an onboarding process, and user research is limited, we had to think creatively from our research to deeply understand how best to serve the users and business.
Research Methods
Observed Usability Testing
5 Recordings
Due to the sensitive nature of Upsolve's user base, our team's biggest constraint was the user research. Design layout was hardcoded, and our access to user research was limited. So, we were laser-focused on our usability testing, taken from 5 users through Hotjar recordings. Only qualitative observations about user pain points were evaluated and time stamps of user completion rates were recorded for us to discover and define our design research.
Synthesis
A sample of one out of our five Hotjar mapping observation recordings. Here were my observations during my session!
Pain Point #1
Repetitive page actions - corrections, re-filling empty boxes, and revisiting previous pages contribute to longer user flow stoppages.
Pain Point #2
Onboarding information clutter - text heavy pages, FAQs, pinned articles, after back and forth contribute to a frustrating feeling of tedious work.
Pain Point #2
Time being educated - overwhelming amounts of information to educate users created increased time gaps throughout the user flow.
Ideation & Iteration
Bouncing Ideas.
Throughout our early calls with Upsolve, we created mid-fidelity wireframes to visualize the idea of reorganizing the information flow, aiming to reduce the information overload. By collapsing the confirm and error pages into a debt summaries hub page, less burden of work is placed on the user to fulfill their needs during onboarding.
Mid-Fidelity Hub Page Wireframe
Visualizing a New Architecture
Current User Experience
Solution: Summary Page as a Hub
Our Solution!
The high-fidelity prototype walks through other proposed features to address mis-categorization and support onboarding user accuracy. There is a 'Helpful Documents' feature to provide users with a section during a specific debt page about what documents the user should prepare along with further visual cues about sections that need immediate attention.
What's Next For Upsolve?
More Time, More Testing
We were told that our designs would help the next cycle of Upsolve's product updates, great! So, if we had more time with Upsolve, we would conduct further usability tests to evaluate the functionality of the summary page as a hub page, and quantify the time saved for users.
Progress For a Progress Bar
While users went through the onboarding flow, further visual cues could help better understand where along the process they place. The current navigation bar does little to indicate this, and is often overlooked to signify an important navigational cue for users. This is the core issue that I tackled in my second client project with Upsolve.
Learn about how I continued working with Upsolve!
Learn about how I continued working with Upsolve!
What Did I Learn?
Think Outside the Research Box
Our team started off this project with significant UX research limitations as we did not have direct interactions with Upsolve's user base. Therefore, we thought outside the box and employed an observational usability study in order to evaluate qualitative data for our core design. We rolled with the punches and found our stride for this complex challenge.
Simple Yet Effective
Part of our information architecture restructure solution was to move an ending summary page near the beginning of the user flow. Our core design solution addresses a navigational issue but resolves multiple other defined issues. This was key to accept because I understood that:
Simple solutions go a long way.
Simple solutions go a long way.