WageGoal

Innovation for the financially underserved

Our team’s goal was to scale the counseling services on a digital platform.

Full-time employed workers living paycheck to paycheck often make enough money to afford all their bills and living expenses, but their paydays don’t correspond to when their bills are due. They land themselves into debt when they use a credit card or a predatory loan to pay bills before their paychecks arrive.

WageGoal tells you if and when your bank balance will hit $0 before a bill is due and enables you to withdraw your paycheck early to afford the bill. WageGoal also analyzes your rate of spending and guides you on how to avoid debt in the future.

I was the lead designer on WageGoal. I worked in a cross-functional team of 2 designers, 5 engineers and 2 product managers. I was in charge of the user experience, user research, interaction design, visual design, branding and front-end code.

Kill the data viz. Numerous rounds of user testing told us that, while finance nerds love to see, visualize, and crunch numbers, numbers do not help people make better financial decisions. We discovered that simple, plain-word recommendations and calls to action were much better understood by our target users.

People know their own finances. Even though our users had trouble paying off their bills, they were well aware of how much the bills were and when they were due. Early prototypes concentrated on ways to help people remember what their bills were, but this proved unnecessary.

People have different strategies to pay their bills. Our product made a key assumption: people try to pay their bills on the date they were due. We eventually uncovered another bill paying behavior: those that pay their bills as a lump sum on payday. This invalidated the key assumption for this group and rendered our solution for them ineffective.

You won’t believe what happened when we built and iterated on one feature for a whole year! Hint: it’s a lesson learned in managing user feedback and stakeholders. Read it here.

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