Research & Service Design · 2014 to 2017
Turning a debt enquiry into something people could act on.
A debt diagnostic and a personalised report, for people working out how to repay what they owed, with the right support.
Role
Designer, then Debt Design Lead
Worked with
A second Designer, and the advisors taking the calls
Focus
Debt diagnostic and personalised report
Outcome
Higher completion, fewer drop-offs
Setting the Scene
Debt Advisory Centre is one of the main debt brands at Think Money Group. People arrived at it because they were struggling to repay what they owed, usually after a change they had not chosen: a job lost, a relationship ended, hours cut.
The job was to take somebody in that position and get them to a point where they understood their own situation and what could be done about it. That meant a form journey and a personalised report, both of them regulated, because financial advice in the UK is not something you can design freely.
There were two of us designing it, one senior to me, and the work was split between us. When he left I took it over as Debt Design Lead. The first build took a year. I stayed across the group’s debt brands until 2017.
Visual coming soon
The form journey
The Work
Asking hard questions gently, then answering them
Research
Research ran throughout rather than at the start. We listened to calls in the call centre, ran workshops with the advisors taking them, tested with customers, and watched session recordings and heatmaps in Hotjar.
That was where every argument came from. If a decision on this project could not be traced back to something we had heard on a call or watched somebody do, it did not have much standing.
The form journey
What we built was a debt diagnostic. Somebody answered questions about what they owed, what they spent and what they earned, across four steps, and it worked out where they stood and signposted them to the help that fitted. Every question in it is one most people would rather not answer, so the work was in asking them without making anybody feel judged for the answer.
It opened by asking where in the UK they lived, because the options available to somebody in Scotland are not the same as the options available to somebody in England. That is a legal difference rather than a design one, and getting it wrong would have meant showing people solutions they could not have.
More people finished the redesigned journey than had finished the one before it, and fewer dropped out partway through.
Visual coming soon
The personalised report
The report
What came back was a personalised report, built from what they had just told us. It gave them a monthly budget summary, income against outgoings, and a breakdown of where the money went: housing, council tax, travel, other debt, phone and internet, day to day living.
Then it set out the options side by side, from a debt management plan through to bankruptcy, and said which ones they were less likely to need. That was key, because bankruptcy is not free. You pay to go bankrupt. So showing somebody in their own numbers that it was not the only road could save them money they did not have.
- Their own figures, not a generic example
- Every option shown, including the ones that would cost them to take
- A clear next step, and a person to talk to about it
And the rest of it
The project grew as it went. It came to include the brand, the website, paid landing pages, and a blog section that I led the implementation of.
The template
When the work on Debt Advisory Centre finished, the group wanted a site for another of its brands, IVA Advisory Centre. I did that one on my own, and built it as a template rather than a one-off. White label, essentially: one journey that could wear a different brand, with responsive layouts the developers could replicate and rebrand quickly. Two weeks including build and test.
The group was spinning debt brands up as experiments, to find out which ones people responded to. Every site after IVA Advisory Centre was built from that template, so a new brand cost weeks rather than months to get in front of anybody.
Reflection
This is the closest I have come to designing a public service without it being one. Somebody in difficulty, a set of options they did not know they had, rules about what could be said to them, and a form standing between the two.
What I took from it is that the report was the product. The journey only existed to make the report possible, and the report only worked because it used their numbers rather than an example. People will tell you a great deal about their situation if they can see it coming back to them as something that makes sense.
“Jade has delivered work from simple landing page optimisation design tweaks, to full website redesigns with full end to end journeys. Jade always has an interest in the business side of her work and wants to understand how it’s performing analytically and from a customer experience point of view.”