Role

Service Designer

Date

2024

Industry

Banking (Digital)

Driving Engagement for Digital Money Management

A value proposition piece aimed at increasing the engagement and adoption of the Personal Financial Management tools on the Westpac app.

The Challenge

Westpac's mobile banking app offers Personal Financial Management (PFM) tools to help customers understand and manage their finances better - from tracking spending, planning bills and budgeting. However, these features have experienced declining and inconsistent engagement since being built into the app in 2022.

This discovery piece set out to build a deeper understanding of PFM’s target users within Westpac’s customer base. The goal was to align the product roadmap more closely to money management needs and behaviours, while creating opportunities to co-design feature enhancements and new solutions with customers.

The Process

Current State Discovery

The project began with a pre-discovery phase to align stakeholders on the problem space. See below a sample of my process in this phase:

Current State Discovery

The project began with a pre-discovery phase to align stakeholders on the problem space. See below a sample of my process in this phase:

Qualitative and Quantitative Research

We conducted 18 x 60-minute in depth interviews alongside a 200-respondent survey to understand engagement with PFM tools. Participants were evenly split across frequent, occasional, rare, and non-users.

The research sought to uncover:

The underlying reasons for varying levels of engagement with PFM tools
Identify the barriers preventing broader usage
Understand the key drivers behind user engagement or disengagement across different customer segments.

Qualitative and Quantitative Research

The research sought to uncover:

The underlying reasons for varying levels of engagement with PFM tools
Identify the barriers preventing broader usage
Understand the key drivers behind user engagement or disengagement across different customer segments.

The Results

Key Findings

We identified seven core barriers to engagement shared across all customers

Key Findings

We identified seven core barriers to engagement shared across all customers

Proficient in Figma, Adobe Creative Suite, and Framer.
Strong understanding of user-centered design principles.
Ability to conduct comprehensive user research and usability testing.
Excellent problem-solving skills and attention to detail.

While these barriers were consistent across customers, their impact varied by level of engagement with PFM - revealing distinct needs, trust levels, and expectations of money management tools.

Synthesising these patterns led to the development of a set of behavioural archetypes that captured customers' underlying attitudes towards money management and their likelihood to adopt PFM:

While these barriers were consistent across customers, their impact varied by level of engagement with PFM - revealing distinct needs, trust levels, and expectations of money management tools.

Synthesising these patterns led to the development of a set of behavioural archetypes that captured customers' underlying attitudes towards money management and their likelihood to adopt PFM:

Proficient in Figma, Adobe Creative Suite, and Framer.
Strong understanding of user-centered design principles.
Ability to conduct comprehensive user research and usability testing.
Excellent problem-solving skills and attention to detail.

Together, these insights reframed PFM as a progressive money management journey—one that must evolve alongside customers’ confidence, capability, and needs over time.

Ideation & Prioritisation

I facilitated cross-functional ideation and DVF prioritisation producing a set of experience principles, a customer-led feature roadmap, and a pipeline of validated solutions progressing into near-term delivery and longer-term business cases:

Proficient in Figma, Adobe Creative Suite, and Framer.
Strong understanding of user-centered design principles.
Ability to conduct comprehensive user research and usability testing.
Excellent problem-solving skills and attention to detail.

The Learnings

Customer-first product validation: Reinforced that a product’s success depends on solving real customer needs as initial PFM features were added without desirability research, creating a gap between business assumptions and how customers actually use the app.
Iterate during research: Learned the value of adapting research mid-stream, refining interview guides and survey instruments in response to emerging insights to capture more meaningful, actionable data.
Question business metrics: Gained experience in challenging traditional engagement metrics, ensuring measures of success align with the behaviours we want to encourage
Balancing strategy and delivery: Strengthened skills in managing competing priorities in a delivery-focused environment,

Customer-first product validation: Reinforced that a product’s success depends on solving real customer needs as initial PFM features were added without desirability research, creating a gap between business assumptions and how customers actually use the app.
Iterate during research: Learned the value of adapting research mid-stream, refining interview guides and survey instruments in response to emerging insights to capture more meaningful, actionable data.
Question business metrics: Gained experience in challenging traditional engagement metrics, ensuring measures of success align with the behaviours we want to encourage
Balancing strategy and delivery: Strengthened skills in managing competing priorities in a delivery-focused environment,

The Feedback

"You demonstrated commitment, very good analysis and process thinking, excellent communication and presentation skills and high attention to detail. You were able to define the problem statement and establish a plan of attack in no time which you've executed with limited help."

Adrian Soldan (Service Owner)

"You did well in wrangling all the pieces of information, and diving in. You showed a robust willingness to take it all on. The difficulty of working alone on this project needs the be acknowledged. In bringing it all together you were able to exceed expectations, well done."

Tobias Robinson (Design Lead)

"I think Therese did an amazing job managing the research process and post research delivery. The time and effort that was put into the presentation pack, the detail that was able to be shared were all of a very high standard."

Jen Bakker (Product Owner)

"You demonstrated commitment, very good analysis and process thinking, excellent communication and presentation skills and high attention to detail. You were able to define the problem statement and establish a plan of attack in no time which you've executed with limited help."

Adrian Soldan (Service Owner)

"You did well in wrangling all the pieces of information, and diving in. You showed a robust willingness to take it all on. The difficulty of working alone on this project needs the be acknowledged. In bringing it all together you were able to exceed expectations, well done."

Tobias Robinson (Design Lead)

"I think Therese did an amazing job managing the research process and post research delivery. The time and effort that was put into the playbacks, the detail that was able to be shared were all of a very high standard."

Jen Bakker (Product Owner)