Putting our Members First: User Experience Shaping the Future of Achieve

The heart and the dollar are integral to our Company’s mission. We empower everyday people to improve their financial future (the dollar) while putting them at the forefront of everything we do with empathetic support (the heart).

Our User Experience (UX) Research Team ensures that we are building intuitive, human-centered digital experiences that don’t just check a box, they actually meet the needs of our members and keep them engaged. 

In the last year alone, the UX Research Team has grown by establishing and scaling research operations as embedded parts of the product development process across the Company. The insights gained have shaped the development and release of multiple solutions to both help speed up time to market and refine the product-market fit, among other benefits. 

We look at our research in two categories; strategic and tactical. 

Strategic research focuses on mapping market opportunities and business requirements into a product roadmap so we’re building the right solution in a way that customers want to use:

• What solutions do our members need to address their pain points?

• How much is it worth to our members to make that pain go away?

• What value propositions and trust markers matter most for solving those pain points?

Tactical research enhances and optimizes an existing product:

• How might we address our members’ pain points within a specific experience slice?

• What solutions resonate most strongly for addressing our users’ most important issues?

So, what does all this research really mean? 

• In the last year alone, we completed 50 research studies. Over 1,300 prospective Achieve members, leads, customers, and employees have shared their feedback on early stage designs for new and existing products. 

• Developed more than 206 hours of study recordings with our users.  It would take more than five work weeks to review all of the feedback that we've integrated into our different product experiences.

• Engaged in six foundational design sprints that accelerated design work on cross-business unit initiatives for Achieve.com, our member experience, apps and our individual solutions. 

• Supported 4 Tech Talks and led 10 cross-functional workshops with our design peers. These workshops drive alignment between product, engineering, and UX, as well as define a strategy for near and long-term planning and product experience. 

• Conducted 14 studies with 330 future members representing the Achieve target audience that was integral to launching our new Achieve site. 

By initiating multiple rounds of research, we refined every aspect of the design and copy for our brand launch in 2022. We validated that the value propositions resonated with the different key target audience segments, that our core messaging and storytelling as a “new-to-them” Company came through, and that we’ve prevented any critical usability and accessibility issues.

Since our September 2022 launch, we’ve seen more than 4x the long form submission rate for Achieve.com compared to our prior Freedom-branded site over the same period. And as we integrate more content, tools, and apps to assist our members on their financial journey, we’ll drive higher organic growth.

But we still have more work to do! Earlier this month we launched our first Achieve-branded app, MoLO, or Money Left Over. We’re still collecting feedback from users and applying updates to make our newest budgeting tool user-friendly, effective, and of course, a simple way for people to get ahead who might be struggling financially. 

Do you want to be a part of future-changing research? Join our UX Research Team and help us create the best-in-class user experiences.

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