As of 2024, almost half of Americans reported having difficulty paying their bills. This is why EarnIn aims to reimagine the way money moves, so every person can better meet their financial potential. As their platform continues to pioneer as one of the most popular tools for accessing people’s future earnings, they wanted to further elevate their in-app user experience. Daylight’s primary objective was to achieve that vision by exploring a variety of interaction patterns and product ideas. My role within the project was to explore and create these designs.
As a core team member, I conducted environmental scans to gather interaction pattern and UX flow inspiration, engaged in broad exploration, collaborated closely with EarnIn's internal design team and executed detailed design work.
UX Designer
EarnIn
Jan, 2024 - May, 2024
In a world where many UI patterns have become standardized and repetitive, EarnIn’s executives saw the value of bringing unique and delightful user experience to their customers—a lesson learned from their signature “transfer out” feature (see example below). While their internal design team is phenomenal in their own right, EarnIn wanted to look further outside the box. Building on this foundation, our team used each bi-weekly sprint to explore different parts of the product and discover ways to make EarnIn’s financial experience truly stand out.
Among the EarnIn customers, Transfer Out is one of the most memorable features.
One of the most fascinating aspects of working as a consultant is the opportunity to collaborate with clients from various industries. This diversity requires us to quickly learn and adapt, but at the same time, we get to leverage our outsider perspective to explore novel ideas and challenge our creative boundaries.
While working with our client in financial services, we needed to understand the concept of Earned Wage Access (EWA), along with the functionality of their mobile app, design system, and operating ecosystem. Despite a fast-paced sprint schedule, we delivered innovative, high-fidelity designs with precision. We achieved this by leveraging a three-designer team, enabling broad exploration of ideas and deep refinement of promising concepts through rapid prototyping.
To achieve the best results, we often explore a wide range of ideas.
For this project, despite the sprint schedule not being built for user testing, we still managed to conduct internal testing sessions with our colleagues. While they were not real users, these sessions gave us a brief sense of what worked and what didn’t. In addition, we regularly hosted review sessions with our client’s working team—including designers, developers, and researchers—to leverage their experience with EarnIn users.
Even though the project was not inherently built for user testing, we found ways to gather feedback and refine our designs. In this case, we turned to our experienced colleagues.
As EarnIn continues to grow, more products are destined to come. With the ever-expanding list of features, EarnIn wanted to rethink their navigation and discovery with the goal of creating a simplified yet delightful cross-selling experience.
Focusing on colors and interaction patterns, I explored a wide range of low-fidelity prototypes. The objective was to explore broadly—no idea was off-limits.
With a combination of colour and interaction design, we explored a wide range of ideas for how users could access these features.
By reorganizing the bottom navigation bar, we designed a dynamic cross-selling experience to highlight commonly used products while enabling users to explore new or unused products from EarnIn—creating a smooth transition between the horizontal and vertical axes.
While functionality is important, EarnIn believes that a compelling user experience creates a long-lasting relationship with customers. The revamp of the onboarding experience was part of the initiative to make that vision come true.
To help the team get inspired, I compiled a set of unique onboarding experiences from other domains.
Environmental scan for various onboarding experiences.
From videos and illustrations to wireframes, we explored ways to introduce EarnIn to users in an engaging manner.
From our ad-hoc user testing, we learned that videos were the most engaging method. However, the experience should be brief—similar to Instagram Stories. Users should also be informed of its duration and given the option to skip.
While the video and copy were purely placeholders, the onboarding content should prioritize explaining the product benefits and value propositions using simple, clear language.
After the intro videos, we designed the account setup flow to align with EarnIn’s brand, featuring a progressive backdrop. This was followed by a seamless product selection experience.
A branded account setup experience that guides users seamlessly into product selection.
Impressed by the output from all the prior sprints, EarnIn tasked us to explore a feature they long had in mind to enable their users to better visualize how their cash flow and help them better manage their finances. Considering usability factors such as spending categories and time spanning past and future, we worked with our client to craft a feature experience that is both functional and captivating.
As a core part of the feature, the main goal is to explore different visualizations and interaction designs.
Another privilege of operating a three-designer team was that we could afford to take on more promising ideas and develop them for further evaluation. This worked well, as our clients often preferred to keep their options open until later. Below are some examples I further refined.
Mock concepts for Cash Flow.
From the client, we learned that customers often have a set amount of recurring earnings and expenses that can be projected. Our goal was to visualize this information and show how their live income could cover upcoming expenses due in the next few weeks. We aimed to create an interface that clearly communicates the relationship between these elements and their associated details. Additionally, recognizing that not all bills share the same priority, we introduced an ordering mechanism that allows users to label their bills and see how prioritized bills are covered compared to simply ordering by due dates.
A Sankey diagram–inspired visualization designed to showcase the relationship between a user’s earnings and expenses. Users can switch views to organize their bills by due dates or by priority.
While these bill details can be automatically determined by connecting to a user's bank activity, we ensured they could also be manually adjusted. Additionally, we provide relevant actions such as setting notifications before due dates or adding them to their calendar.
Users can click on an individual bill to edit details and access relevant actions.
As part of the deliverables, we also designed the onboarding experience for users to set up their Cash Flow. By connecting to and analyzing their bank account, the system generates a list of recurring bills. Through machine learning, these bills are labeled by different priority levels (e.g., essential, important, secondary).
Overview to how users set up their cash flow.
A unique part of the onboarding for cash flows was goal setting. Working with the client, we identified a set of savings goals with a duration filter that are based on past data. The core idea is to help EarnIn users establish realistic goals that are within reach.
Set up a realistic saving goal.
The comment above came from one of the EarnIn executives. While the project was originally set to last three months, the client decided to extend the contract and continue our partnership. Since this was client work, we did not have access to their success metrics. That being said, I’ve discussed some hypothetical metrics that could be used to evaluate the success of our work.
While we managed to find ways to collect insights, I personally wished we could have recruited real EarnIn users for the most authentic feedback. The good news was that EarnIn had an internal rolling research protocol and user testing cycle—something I would strongly advocate leveraging if we were to redo the project. At the end of the day, nothing beats the real deal.