Budgeting (Confidential + WIP)

Chase

For most people, it’s hard—really hard—to budget.

A huge part of that is because it’s complex and tedious to track all the money going in and out of your account throughout the month, across:

• refunds
• pending and posted transactions
• bills with different due dates
• transfers to different accounts
• P2P platforms like Venmo and Zelle

And not knowing what you’ve actually spent in a given month makes it hard to do some really important things—like cut back on spending, pay bills on time, and save money.

TL;DR: If you can’t track your money, you don’t know what you’ve spent, which means you can’t stick to a budget, which means you can’t save money regularly.

We built something to help people calculate how much they're able to safely spend or save each month, and track this number for them.

Challenge

Our goal was to help users understand and track their spending, so they can spend less than they make each month, so they can save more. We want to help users change their spending behavior so they can achieve financial freedom.

On the business side, we needed to build an MVP budgeting feature that increased engagement with an existing spending feature, drove Autosave enrollment, and led to more savings deposits.

It needed to connect seamlessly with the rest of Chase’s growing financial health suite.

Helping customers manage their spending was also a longer-term play to learn more about their life goals, like buying a house or saving for retirement (i.e., deepen and broaden customer engagement).

Design Process

In addition to extensive research, I paired with designers and participated in multiple working sessions. We created user flows that outlined the end-to-end customer journey, starting from the homepage entry point and ending with a spending recap at the end of each month.

I wrote all visible and accessibility content for Web, iOS and Android, presented to stakeholders, obtained legal and compliance approvals, facilitated translation into Spanish, and worked closely with developers to bring it all to life.

Concept Research

We did a lot of reading when defining the problem.

We learned that behavioral economics research mirrors what we found in our own: category-based budgeting is not effective at helping people change habits and stick to goals. In fact, it can help justify increased spending (“I didn’t spend as much in X category as I thought I would, so that means I can buy Y”).

After multiple studies and competitive analyses, we ruled out all existing forms of budgeting as ineffective in achieving actual behavior modification.

Solution

Users wanted a solution that focused on the present and future, not just the past. They wanted a solution that focuses on how much flexibility they have in that moment, and how they can stay or get back on track by the end of the month.

In short, we wanted to make it easy for users to track a single number for all the spending they control within a month.

We would calculate a user’s monthly budget by taking their monthly income and subtracting all their monthly transactions (i.e., monthly bills and transfers to other accounts). This is a play on a zero-based budget.

This monthly budget is what you actually have available to spend or save that month, to be used however you like.

All spending comes out of this budget, including categories that are typically considered monthly bills, like groceries. Why? How much you spend on groceries is just as flexible and context-sensitive as traditionally “discretionary” spending.

At the end of the month, if users didn’t spend all of their budget, we helped them save what was left. To motivate users, we decided to reframe this understanding as potential savings.

We also introduced the concept of daily pacing, which I’ll explain further on.

Our data algorithm was responsible for surfacing each customer’s monthly transactions, but we knew there was significant room for error—especially once we started incorporating non-Chase accounts. That made clear and easy editing all the more important.

This is especially important for bills that are indeed monthly, but might shift in dollar amount or date each month (e.g., utilities).

And of course, we had to find the right amount of detail to share with customers, without presenting unnecessary information.

Content testing: Finding the right terms

Updating a long-standing financial institution’s vocabulary is not easy.

In the middle of delivery, we conducted two spending taxonomy studies to learn how customers used and defined different terminology. This would help us figure out which terms to use, and exactly what their definitions should encompass.

We knew that to calculate accurate budgets, we needed content that made it easy for users to know which transactions to include per category, but that were specific to our budgeting experience and algorithm (read: technical limitations).

In short, we could add or append some terms to fit our experience (“bills”), but other proposals would conflict with established definitions (“recurring”).

I also aimed to only give components a name if it would aid customer comprehension, and not just because we had a name for it internally.

Spend taxonomy study 1

Method: Survey, card sort

Research goals

• Is there really any difference between the terms “spending” and “expenses”?
• How can we clearly separate the world of recurring spending/expenses into two categories?
  • Soft/hard commitments (e.g., bills, subscriptions)
  • Anticipated (e.g., buying coffee every day)
• What do people classify as income (e.g., tax refunds, fee reversals, one-time sale of stocks)? What’s the importance of steady vs. volatile in this definition (e.g., getting a deposit every month vs. one time)?
• What terms should we use to denote:
  • Income, spending, expenses (as we define expenses)
  • Inflows and outflows
  • Are any of the above an accurate definition of “cashflow”?

Summary

• Cash flow is perceived as overall money movement
• People refer to the money coming in and out of their accounts as being types of income and types of expenses. For example, common distinctions include “steady income” vs. “extra income,” or “necessary expenses” vs. “discretionary expenses”
• Income and expenses are perceived to have distinct sub-components. People tend to group different forms of income (money in) and expenses (money out) within 4-5 salient categories

Spend taxonomy study 2: Follow-up

Method: Survey

This was one study we conducted, focused on taxonomy and content strategy.

Research goals

• What terms do people use to describe the following different types of money that come into and out of their account each month?
  • Steady monthly deposits
  • Recurring monthly obligations
  • The amount remaining of your income, after accounting for recurring transfers and obligations
  • The amount of money left in your checking account that is not intended for spending

Summary

• To describe funds coming into their account, both salaried employees and gig-workers chose and generated the term “income,” replicating prior research
• Both salaried employees and gig-workers defined one’s monthly obligations as “monthly bills & subscriptions”
  • Gig-workers were more likely to generate “expenses”; salaried employees, “bills”
• Both salaried employees and gig-workers defined the money remaining after one’s expenses as “available to spend.” Despite concerns, phrases involving “budget” also tested well
• There was no clear term for keeping extra money in your account (to avoid overdraft fees, etc.). Generated terms included cushion,” “buffer,” “reserves,” and “minimum balance”

Budgeting Dashboard

The dashboard is within the context of one month, and has two main states:

Naming

After partnering with Marketing on multiple research projects to come up with a product name (a decision already fraught with misgivings), we ultimately went back to basics: “budget.”

Our product is piloting the descriptive language approach (“branded house, not a house of brands”), and naming for future finhealth and Chase products will follow this paradigm.

I wrote a short content strategy playbook for engaging with the product name, within and outside of Digital. It was presented to and approved by senior leadership, and carried across Consumer Banking and Field Marketing materials.

Content strategy: Director’s cut

Where previous projects required new features, the idea behind those features always existed elsewhere—in other apps, or in other parts of Chase. Or they were built on top of existing functionality, like with Autosave goals.

That wasn’t the case here.

It’s easy to write content for tools and functionality people expect. But too often, we fail to innovate when we otherwise could because we cannot get over the hurdle of introducing new concepts that break existing expectations.

This is where one of the most important and interesting challenges of content strategy comes in: knowing how to frame information—and in this case, enable innovation in behavior modification-focused budgeting. I’m proud we were able to accomplish this.

Feedback so far

We’ve received exceptional feedback from bankers on the pilot, and believe the product will save time and money:

• “I would share this with every customer I met with.”
• “This is great for the customers who have goals but don’t know how to get there.”
• “I spend so much time trying to collect this info from customers; it will be so helpful to be able to pull this up.”

Next steps

Partial rollout Q4 2020; full rollout in 2021.