Bills in Mint
Objective
Increase engagement and retention within the Mint app
Replace the current Bill Reminder feature in Mint with the functionality of the Mint Bills app
Keep parity with the Mint Bills functionality
Sunset the Mint Bills app
Previous Bill Reminder card in Mint
Mint Bills and Mint Apps
Challenge
Deconstruct the Mint Bills application to document flows, business rules, functionality
Fit the Mint Bills feature within the Mint experience
Make minimal changes to function, flows, logic, and layouts
Role
Design Lead for the project,
Focus on Mobile Experience,
UX Designer for the Bill Pay flows
Research lead
Fitting bills into the Mint Architecture
I began by breaking down the Information Architecture of the Mint and Mint Bills applications, then worked with the team to decide which features were unique and which duplicates. I then broke down the project into logical feature sets and visualized the changes.
Research and testing
Throughout the project, I led and facilitated customer empathy, ethnographic, co-design, and usability research with Mint and Mint Bills customers.
Participants from our initial customer immersion event
As an outcome of both generative and empathic research, co-design, and usability testing, it was clear that everyone has an existing system to manage and pay their bills, some better than others. Payments are primarily made through online payments directly to billers or bank bill pay, and many are set up with automatic payments. The effort to migrate to a new system would be a big lift for most people. Although we could provide a solution to help track which bills were due and paid, getting customers to pay with Mint would take further understanding and ideation. Only 25% of active Mint Bills users pay through the app, with the primary use case being tracking bills in one place.
Solution
We set out to work within the existing Mint design language but found numerous inconsistencies within the Mint application. Thus, we defined and refined a design system based on the best current patterns within the Mint app and best practices.
The big lift within the project was re-architecting and integrating disparate back-end systems to aggregate and manage financial accounts, non-financial billers, and bill payments.
Outcomes
We released a 2-month ramp-up strategy reaching 100% in mid-December. From the beginning, we gathered feedback through the apps allowing us to get real-time insights regarding reactions, usage, and issues. We continue to gather feedback, driving straightforward enhancements to the apps and identifying problems that require more understanding and thought. These drove our bills-related roadmap for the next 3-6 months.
Active users, feature activity, payments, payers, amount per payment, and dollar volume consistently increased from the initial release. Some cases outperform the Mint Bills app, and primary Care contact volume is focused on data quality and biller coverage. From the beginning, we see all the right trends that we would expect.
“If you don't have a Mint account, you're missing out on one of the best personal finance apps on the market.”
— PCMag: Editors' Choice (April 28, 2017)
U.S. Patent awarded for the animated visual representation of bills and bill payments.