Background

As the design lead, and the only designer on the credit score team, I have been responsible for the refreshed Mint Credit Score experience across all 3 platforms. In the 2 month mission, I was tasked with enhancing the Overview and Details with a larger need for a rebrand and marketing push, as well as incorporating the two of the newly formed product principles:

1. Confidence at a glance

2. Provide actionable insights

The previous version had a lot of experience gaps, which were a result of several teams injecting their content and ideas into the experience without looking at credit score as an end-to-end experience. The user journey was not clear, and the design lacked a point of view on what the user should take away from the experience.

Mint is a cross-platform product supported on iOS, Android, Web & Mobile Web. The final desktop designs and explorations are below

Testing & Validation

The team rapidly tested the designs with users, both in person and on usertesting.com to see whether their key takeaways were the ones we were going for. I did the same process for web, but with some extra real estate at our disposal, our content designer added some insight 

As it turned out with both sets of interviews (mobile and web), there was a lot of debate about which two factors to highlight. So our team decided to resolve the debate like any nerdy team - doing an A/B test. Well, it was more of an A/B/C/D test 😇

Since running the test on platforms would be taxing on the server to live-assign users into buckets, we settled on the card where there are deltas for what's changed from month to month, the top two factors and it's delta, as well as a band descriptor that helps users understand where they stand for the mobile platforms.

The full report

The report details was the second part of this restructure, one that took of exploring to carefully pick out portions that weren't necessary, that led to the final experience as it stands today.

The report consists of several factors (trendlines), and a scale for each of them so users can understand where they stand.

We wanted to convey and explain each of these factors, their weightage on the score, and how it changed since the last report. The factors are:

• On-time payments

• Credit usage

• Average age of credit

• Total accounts

• Credit inquiries

• Derogatory marks

The redesign for both apps and web are below, along with explorations.

The flows going from overview to the report details were first tested through user interviews and 1 on 1 usability. After the final few contenders were decided upon, I did a usability study with 30 participants, where everything from time-to-task, understanding each factor, where they stand, what's changed, and key takeaways were tested after which the final flows were determined, as well as a need for a first-time use for users who didn't fully understand how credit works, and the role each of the factors play in the final score.

I worked closely with our content writer to create these first-time use flows for when a new and existing users would see the new credit score experience. We also wanted to make sure that this valuable information isn’t a fleeting experience, so we made it accessible from the report itself.

Having 60% users going through all factors was pretty exciting, and getting noticed on ReallyGoodUX was a nice bonus :)

The overview and report were just the beginning. The credit score is going through complete information architecture restructure to retain important information, and highlight only what's needed, while untangling 4-level deep navigation.

Since several of the factors led to the same endpoint, and every account had the same information, I saw an opportunity to flatten the IA and clean up the experience so users don’t find themselves 3, or sometimes 4 levels deep looking at the same information.