What it is: NerdWallet+ is a paid membership that allows you to earn rewards for making smart financial decisions and managing your finances with NerdWallet.
Members earn points for things like keeping a budget, monitoring their credit score, paying bills, and more using the NerdWallet site or app
Why it mattered:
With continuing SEO volatility, NerdWallet+ was a big swing to create a new source of revenue.
Entry messaging had to meet user needs for information without harming existing conversion.
In the first quarter after launch, the program beat revenue goals by 30%.
How I contributed:
Kept content strategy consistent across multiple teams.
Helped cross-functional partners stay in alignment with proactive communication and detailed documentation.
Proposed design solutions to meet user needs while sticking to business requirements.
The challenges
NerdWallet, a financial services company, wanted to create a new premium membership. Members would pay a fee to gain access to a rewards program as well as exclusive savings and services. As a content designer I was asked to create messaging for the entry points, onboarding, and member dashboard.
Due to tight timelines, the onboarding flow needed to be designed while the program features and rules were still being defined, and our legal team was still researching new compliance requirements.
The program design and build was spread across three teams and additional teams (user ops, CRM, marketing) were involved as well.
This was a high-profile initiative with involvement and input from stakeholders all the way up to the highest levels of leadership.
The solutions
Tight timelines
Proactive communication: After joining the project to help one product team, I realized that more teams were involved and quickly reached out to these other teams to understand what they were responsible for and how I might help them as well.
To stay connected, share information, and work together to solve problems quickly, the UX managers and ICs created a weekly meeting and Figjam document where we could communicate what we were working on, share files, and plan collaboration.
Content guidelines and components: Because the timeline for design was short, I couldn’t be involved in every piece of copy that appeared throughout the experience. Instead, I focused on solving the trickiest content problems, aligning on terminology, and keeping up with changes in the program details and legal requirements so I could ensure that copy created by copywriters, designers, or others was consistent, accurate, and legally compliant. I also contributed content guidelines and components to the NerdWallet+ design playbook to help copywriters working on other teams efficiently write consistent copy that hit the right voice and tone.
Working across multiple teams
Documenting the user journey: Because multiple teams were contributing to the design and build of NerdWallet+, and the program was going through rapid iterations, it quickly became difficult to get an end-to-end view of the program. As the project progressed, it became more and more difficult to seek feedback with multiple designs and versions constantly being created. For my own use, I created an asset map of the entire journey, bringing all of the latest design versions together and adding any other touchpoints I was aware of.
Creating a source of truth for copy: In addition to the asset map, I also created a consolidated copy document that served as a source of truth for the copy for our engineering, QA, and legal teams. This document brought all NerdWallet+ content into one place so I could easily review copy for consistency, voice and tone, and proper terminology.
Keeping myself and teammates informed: Because changes were happening frequently, I made sure I was in team syncs where product owners communicated changes and new information. I then served as a bridge between teams, making sure to communicate program updates, new technical requirements, and new design versions to my partners on other teams to help everyone stay up-to-date during a fast-moving process.
Navigating competing points-of-view
Stay focused and pick battles: Because this was a big swing for the company, there were a lot of opinions and viewpoints to navigate. As designers we were navigating input from multiple sources, some at the executive level and some with competing points of view. To help manage my response to feedback, I chose two truths to stay focused on:
The main metric for MVP launch was credit card revenue, not memberships.
The top recommendation from both UX and market research was to clearly convey the rewards available. Users weren’t motivated to pay money for a membership without evaluating whether the rewards were worth it to them.
Using these two truths as my north star when responding to feedback helped me choose which battles to pick, and provided backing for my decisions when called upon to defend them.
Proactively propose content design solutions: Because everyone was working quickly and had little time to spare, there wasn’t a lot of buy-in for alternative design ideas that were abstract or theoretical. I quickly found that if I felt strongly about an alternate design solution, I would need to mock it up myself to get buy-in from my design and product management partners.
EXAMPLE: I felt our initial entry point for credit card shopping pages didn’t have enough information to convince people to sign up, but the allowed space for the component was too small to add more. Looking at components we had in our design system and used elsewhere in the product, I mocked up a few examples of how we might use expandable components to allow interested users to view more information without taking up more space for users who weren’t interested.
I presented my ideas to my product design partner and a design manager, bringing in verbatim from our UX research to support the need for adding more information while being mindful that the owners of our credit card shopping pages did not want to distract users too much from shopping for credit cards.
After seeing the mockups, my product design partners were excited about the possibilities. With agreement from our design manager, my product design partner took my mockups and created a new design prototype with a new expandable component based on one of my ideas and successfully made the case for an expandable component in addition to the static banner.
While NerdWallet+ came in below its initial membership goal, the program exceeded expectations by all other measures. Most importantly, it beat the primary revenue goal by 30%. We also found that NerdWallet+ members were 3x more engaged with NerdWallet than free NerdWallet accountholders. These initial results were enough for the company to increase resources to NerdWallet+ and dedicate the rest of the year to building out the program with more robust features.