Budgeting accounts
Around 47,000 accounts had one or more incomes set up and were using budgeting.
Case study
thinkmoney SmartBudget.
Turning a complex budgeting service into a clearer product experience, while helping more customers understand, set up and get value from it.
Role
Head of Design
Focus
Activation, budgeting setup and UX
Product
thinkmoney SmartBudget
Contribution
Product thinking, research synthesis, journey design, prioritisation and design direction
Overview
The budgeting product was valuable once customers were using it. The bigger problem was getting them there.
SmartBudget uses regular income and payment information to forecast ahead, set money aside for bills and show customers what should remain available to spend.
I worked across the experience as we moved from fixing immediate post-launch issues towards a broader question: how could we make budgeting easier to understand, easier to set up and more likely to become part of a customer's everyday account?
Budgeting CSAT
Satisfaction was strong amongst customers already using the service.
Setup completion
Only 3% of the summer 2024 onboarding cohort completed budgeting setup.
The challenge
A simple promise sat on top of a complicated financial model.
Multiple incomes, payment schedules, matching rules, shortfalls and changing payment dates could all affect what customers saw.
The challenge was making the outcome clear without asking customers to understand the complexity behind it.
What customers were telling us
Trust depended on customers understanding what had happened to their money.
Money held unexpectedly
Customers reported more money being set aside for bills than they expected.
Balances were unclear
The relationship between money reserved for bills and money available to spend wasn't always obvious.
Income wasn't always recognised
Matching issues could make the product behave as though expected income hadn't arrived.
Notifications arrived too late
Delayed messages left customers unsure whether payments or money movements had completed.
Customer research
Research showed what was working and where confidence was breaking down.
Customers found the app easy to navigate, responded positively to the visual design and liked important information being surfaced on the homepage.
But balances, regular payments and understanding when incoming money became available exposed where the product's internal logic was creating customer uncertainty.
Product shift
We moved from fixing screens to understanding the wider product problem.
Understand
Combine customer feedback, complaints, behavioural data and operational insight.
Explore
Look beyond individual screens at proposition, communication and product behaviour.
Focus
Cluster the evidence and identify the areas most important to investigate.
Measure
Establish setup metrics so future changes could be judged against behaviour.
Workshop
We widened the problem before narrowing the solution.
I helped structure a cross-functional workshop around how customers understood budgeting, what they needed to complete setup and how the product could create longer-term value.
Synthesis
This wasn't primarily a layout problem.
Ideas clustered around engagement and functionality, followed by value proposition, design and product. Layout was only a small part of the problem.
Design focus
Turn the evidence into a smaller set of useful design decisions.
Explain the value first
Make the benefit of budgeting clear before asking customers to configure it.
Improve the route into setup
Introduce budgeting at the right point and make progress through setup obvious.
Show what happens to money
Make payment movement and budgeting outcomes clearer without exposing the underlying system.
Reduce manual work
Use existing account and payment data wherever possible rather than asking customers to recreate it.
Setup experience
Give new customers a clearer route into budgeting.
In July 2024 a dedicated setup journey introduced Learning Mode, giving customers a clearer structure for moving towards an active budget.
Later work gave customers more choice over how they entered information, including individual incomes and bills rather than only overall amounts.
Measuring the problem
Setup completion became a measurable product health metric.
Instead of judging individual screens, we measured how new customers progressed through onboarding and budgeting setup as cohorts.
Funnel and cohort views in Power BI gave the team a foundation for deciding what to improve next and judging whether future changes moved customer behaviour.
Product direction
Turn budgeting setup from an assumption into an activation goal.
20%
Proposed medium-term target for budgeting setup completion.
45%
Proposed longer-term ambition as the experience matured.
Cohorts
A framework for tracking activation over time rather than isolated snapshots.
Product evolution
From a budgeting feature to a clearer customer journey.
Reflection
The most important design decision was deciding what problem we were really solving.
SmartBudget could easily have become an endless sequence of small UX fixes. Stepping back showed a bigger opportunity: customers who used budgeting were broadly satisfied, but too few new customers were successfully getting through setup.
That changed the conversation from improving isolated screens to improving activation, and gave the team a measurable way to judge the product over time.