The problem (and opportunity)

With the HL Cash ISA, clients can spread their money across multiple savings products, all within a single tax-wrapper.

At the start of this project, clients could only choose Easy Access products. However, the business now wanted to make Fixed Term products available.

For that to happen, however, a problem needed to be solved; where to put the clients money once the Fixed Term ends.

What made this a challenge is that HL isn’t able to hold the clients money for more than three days, if it is outside of a savings product. Therefore, if the client didn’t make a decision within those three days, the business would have to return it to their bank account. Consequently the money would leave their tax-wrapper, which is a terrible client outcome!

Our mission was to find a way of ensuring clients’ money didn’t leave their Cash ISA post-maturity, complied with all regulations, and importantly, did so in a process that clients found intuitive and understandable.

I worked in a multidisciplinary team, including a Product manager, User researcher, Content designer and a Business analyst.

My role

• Conduct stakeholder interviews.

• Design and build prototypes of various fidelities and functionality.

• Run workshops.

• The user interface (UI) design.

• Support developers in the building of the UI.

• Present to stakeholders throughout the project.

• Observe and contribute to usability testing sessions.

Our process

Understanding the problem

Our first step was to get a deep understanding the problem.

Initially we did this through stakeholder interviews across the business.

We took note of constraints that surrounded the project; be they business, technical, legal, regulatory, operational, or other.

Exploring solutions

After an initial period of investigation, we began exploring potential solutions, which we could test with real users.

One idea was to utilise an existing feature called 'Default Savings product' which many clients already used. This allowed clients to select one product to be their default destination for all ‘loose’ money - such as having just matured from Fixed Term product.

Taking a high-level view, I mapped out screen flows of how such a solution could work, indicating points such as user inputs and system checks. We used to facilitate further conversations with stakeholders.

Initial rounds of usability testing

We decided to take one early idea into usability testing to learn more about our users. Whilst the solution had made sense from a business, legal, operational, and technical point of view, our users struggled with it.

We observed that clients found the process of having to set up a Default Savings product before opening any fixed term products both confusing and interruptive.

We learned a huge amount from our first usability test, and we improved the journey based off the findings. However, after a second round of testing, we found clients were still fundamentally struggling with the process.

Back to the (ideation) workshop

Having witnessed clients' confusion with our first solution, I decided to run an ideation workshop with a variety of stakeholders to gather some fresh perspectives.

An idea emerged to auto enrol clients into an Easy Access product, once their Fixed Term product matured.

The benefit would be minimal interruption to the client’s journey when opening their Fixed Term product.

A solution that worked for the business, and our users

We set out to assess the new option, and I designed a prototype we could put in front of clients. This tested the Fixed Term product opening journey; the period of impending maturity; through to post-maturity.

Whilst not perfect, initial testing revealed that users were very comfortable with our prototyped process, and were happy with every part of the experience.

After further refinement, the business now has a ready-to-run, user-centric, tested process for clients to easily open and manage their Fixed Term products within their Cash ISA, all the way until maturity (and afterwards). Their money would be protected throughout, and be at zero risk of leaving their tax-wrapper.