Virgin Money Wallet App - Case Study

Project type: Enterprise Fintech - B2C

Role & responsibilities: Lead Product Designer, responsible for end-to-end user experience and design Wallet App & microsite

Tools: Figma, Sketch, Marvel, Miro

My approach

My UX design approach follows a user-centric Design Thinking process grounded in empathy and iteration. I start by conducting research to deeply understand users, and uncover their needs, motivations, and challenges. From there, I define the problem, forming a clear view based on user insights. I then ideate, generating a range of potential solutions to test as hypotheses. By building prototypes, I can quickly validate ideas, iterating based on user feedback. Testing is a continuous process where I engage users through qualitative and quantitative methods, ensuring the final solution is both effective and meaningful. This approach ensures that every design decision is purposeful and rooted in real user needs.

I will now demonstrate how I used this approach with the Virgin Money Wallet, yielding great results.

Setting the scene

Virgin Money saw an opportunity to develop a digital wallet app that would be uniquely placed to offer a multi-dimensional experience to its customers, as you can see from this Venn diagram on the right.

I joined in May 2022 as Lead Product Designer, taking over from Head of Digital to be responsible for the end-to-end user experience of the Digital Wallet App and microsite. As well as sign-off point for Accenture and Virgin Money teams.

Empathy 

As a team, we did extensive research to understand the needs and pain points of the customer. From initial discovery and target customer research to the proposition, behaviour incentives, go-to-market activation and offers strategy.

Target customer
We reviewed the existing Virgin Money audience groups, overlaying affinity segments and category data and from this analysis, the Older Gen-Z & Millennial audience was selected. We found that the target group values convenience, control and rewards from their banks. This would later form the basis of the proposition. This audience also contained the greatest distribution of UK mobile banking users.

Virgin Atlantic Credit Card users 

For MVP we took a sub-set of the Wallet target customer. Our data showed Virgin Atlantic Airways credit card users were highly engaged and were always looking for ways to boost points. This segmentation would allow us to get to market at pace with a controlled user group while continuing to test customer appetite.

Define

We completed three rounds of customer desirability testing to define the proposition and experience. We conducted ethnographic research to identify and explore the proposition and further interviews & surveys to validate & refine the proposition and explore the customer experience.

What did we learn? That 82% found the digital wallet proposition appealing and a market differentiator for Virgin Money.

Ideate: MVP Proposition

Through the research, 3 themes emerged, which formed the groundwork on which the Wallet proposition was developed.

All your accounts in one place
These days people have a growing number of bank accounts. We wanted to create an all-in-one digital wallet that enables you to see all your accounts in one place.

‘Boss your money’
Research showed some people find money matters boring and overwhelming. Virgin Money Wallet helps people understand their money and get in control, through insights based on frequent intersections and personalised nudges.

Do stuff that makes you happy 
People want to spend money on the things they love doing, from experience days to trips abroad; the Wallet enables you to earn Virgin Points through Virgin Red and gives access to a growing set of promotions from across Virgin and beyond.

Measure success

The objective of the MVP was to validate our core hypothesis: whether the combination of a wallet from Virgin Money and Virgin Red creates a compelling and engaging proposition. And will provide more ways for people to earn points faster and increase engagement and spending across the Virgin Group.

To measure success, we tracked sign-up acquisition rates and monitored engagement based on log-in frequency. For Virgin Red, we evaluated engagement increases with Virgin Red offers. In terms of the co-branded Virgin Atlantic credit card, we measured improvements in engagement and satisfaction, as indicated by improved smile scores compared to the baseline.

Prototype, test & iterate

We conducted multiple rounds of experimentation through both moderated and unmoderated testing with the MVP target audience. Our focus was on three key areas. Appeal; where we explored what customers liked and disliked about the experience. Comprehension; to determine if customers intuitively understood the different offerings and how they should interact with them. Usability; to assess whether the app's structure was intuitive and easy to navigate.

To support our qualitative research, we used heat mapping software to track where customers clicked, helping validate our observations. We also designed specific missions to assess the usability and comprehension of various tasks within the app. After completing each mission, users were asked to reflect on any aspects they found particularly difficult or easy. For example, users were tasked with finding their Virgin points balance, locating where they last earned points, and checking their remaining credit card balance.

The insights gathered from these missions were integrated into each design sub-epic which created a feedback loop, either reinforcing our design choices or prompting necessary changes.

Launch & metrics  

We launched the Wallet in the App Store, in April 2023. 

As part of the launch strategy, we created 6 cohorts to find the most compelling launch incentives. We analysed what type of incentive (if any) we should launch with, and validated if we saw any key behaviour changes between the cohorts following different incentives.

All the work, my process and our experiments led to a 12% conversion rate - more than double the target of 5%. The work from the empathy and define phases fed into the comms and marketing channels. We achieved a 68% open rate on invite emails, and a 20% ‘Click Through Rate’ to the Wallet microsite. 
We tested multiple push notification messages and achieved open rates of 29%, which is 17% better than Virgin Money's average notification performance. 

In a survey with Wallet users from September 2023, all of the participants listed “being able to see my credit card spend and my point transaction in one app” as the greatest feature of the Wallet.

Proving one of our hypotheses; that the combination of Virgin Money and Virgin Red in a digital wallet, creates a compelling consumer proposition. 

We also saw a rise in Virgin Atlantic Credit Card Smile score from the baseline.

What didn’t go to plan…

It doesn’t always go to plan, 100% of the time. Our App Store rating was impacted by several challenges during the launch. The Wallet MVP was the first project on the Azure cloud in Virgin Money. A widespread issue with Azure (which we were aware of thanks to Adobe Analytics) caused the app to be down for several days, and the time it took to address the problem was longer than we would have preferred.

Additionally, we tracked each screen in the onboarding journey and noticed a significant drop-off during the 'find credit card linking' step. This was primarily because many users who downloaded the app did not have a Virgin Atlantic credit card. We tackled this issue with improved copy and added a ‘Waiting list’ feature on the microsite, to manage expectations and gather user demand for the product.

Both the Azure issue and the credit card linking confusion led to multiple complaints and negative reviews, and we ended up with a two-star rating.

Testimonial

“Carien demonstrated a clear understanding of the project and has led the design work with tenacity and confidence.”

It has been a joy working with Carien on the digital wallet project these past few weeks. Despite being fairly new to Virgin Money and having only been with the business for a matter of months Carien demonstrated a clear understanding of the project and has led the design work with the tenacity and confidence. There are multiple internal stakeholders involved plus complex partnership with Virgin Red, which has resulted in many iterations, feedback sessions and continue evaluation of the designs, which Carien has been a key part of. I look forward to continuing to work with her as the project moves towards it’s MVP release.

- Senior Content Designer at Virgin Money - Stef Scott, 9 Sep 2022