Map My Plan are a web-based start-up who provide robotised financial guidance for the Australian market. Engaging.io have been working with Map My Plan from the very beginning of the project and have been proud to help them realise their vision, right from concept through to its current multi-award winning product.

Map My Plan are continually focussed on enhancing their user journey and approached us to re-engineer their onboarding process for new users. They wanted a simplified introduction to their product, but one that still captured the necessary information to provide sound financial guidance for their customers.

The challenge

Our challenge was how to actually capture more information, whilst simultaneously streamlining the process to reduce the number of data entry fields for new users. There is no getting away from the that fact the financial advice industry requires a lot of information from their clients. We wanted to limit the number of fields and amount of data that users would have to complete to only those which were completely necessary for that particular stage of the user journey.

We were confident though. Both because we have worked with Map My Plan for nearly 4 years and built their system from the ground up, and also because this project involved combining best practice UX design with kick-arse back-end development. Our two favourite things.

UX Design

Based on extensive testing and feedback from Map My Plan’s users, we really focussed on the ‘choice architecture’ of the new process. We wanted users to only see what is most relevant for them based on previous answers, then order the response options to be tailored in such a way that makes their decision-making process effortless.

We ensured that the route users take to start working towards achieving their financial freedom was not only consistent, but optimised to provide the most efficient use of each user’s time.

We also simplified the dashboard so that only the financial goals the user has started are displayed, whilst providing options for recommended goals to start and steps to take.

UI design

We redesigned the user interface (UI) of the onboarding data gathering to reduce ‘form shock’. As users start their journey they are only ever presented with one question at a time and a progress bar helps to provide context. As Map My Plan is a fully responsive website, this style of questioning works especially well for mobile and so it has made a great way to consistently engage users in a device-neutral environment. It employs a style far closer to simulating an actual conversation rather than the traditional questionnaire format employed by so much of the financial services industry.

Technical wizardry

Good design is almost everything when it comes to websites, but if the back-end doesn’t deliver what the design promises, the whole thing comes crashing down.  Robotised financial advice is incredibly complex and requires a lot of input from the user to capture all the required information. With ever-changing legislative obligations coupled with millions of potential unique outputs to build and test, it’s a minefield for developers.  One of the reasons robotised advice had never been built in Australia prior to Map My Plan was quite simply because no-one was willing to work out the complexities.

Our team of in-house developers used dynamic routing principles to re-code both the onboarding process and individual financial goals to make the entire backend a true relational database.  Information gathered in onboarding is routed through to all relevant fields throughout the site. As certain data fields become redundant based on user answers then they are hidden. Others that require further information have steps implemented to guide users towards completing those goals at their own convenience.

The result

Essentially, a very happy client, and very happy users.  We have reduced the average onboarding time by 30% whilst actually collecting more relevant data than the previous iteration.  Through back-end changes, we have reduced the number of fields a user has to complete for any one goal by an average of 12%.

The new design added considerably to the marketability of the product, with both outstanding feedback and increased interest from Map My Plan’s corporate clients.

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