Acorns Earn

Acorns Earn allows customers to earn cashback rewards while shopping thousands of brands.

In 2020, as Senior Product Designer, I led the design initiative to refurbish our 4-year-old experience into something fresh and clean, with a host of new features and end-to-end improvements that aimed to elevate our Earn experience.

Problems

Start with the existing problems, build goals that drive the team toward finding the right solution.

Problems ranged from space utilization to lack of with clarity, which hindered customers from activating offers. We established three high level goals and attached KPI’s to each to measure how successful each of the solutions were.

Box Flows

Establish the holistic flow and address any concerns with the general experience.

We looked at the relative screen size of UI elements compared to the % of revenue generated, and identified several discrepancies. Our featured banner took up 39% of an iPhone X screen while only generating 2.3%—this data formed the basis of what we would test against as we experimented into the new layout. Overall the flow did not change.

The Process

The team forged new updates to product development process to establish better ways of working.

Always start with the customer. Our process began with customer insights, understanding what’s blocking customers. From there we were able to establish a process that ran through product development, ending with quality assurance and incremental launches.

Experimentation

The team was methodical with running experiments to measure the changes we were shipping.

We experimented with almost every new module, A/B testing the search, categories, carousels—making sure every update elevated the experience. After several months we saw not only an uptick in engagement, but a massive visual transformation.

Here you can see examples of the old vs. the newer screens. The home screen went through various iterations and was eventually build over a number of small phases. Data analytic were able to provide the team with data throughout the process.

During 2020 we updated our home widget, Earn home, search, and offer details. We cleaned up the UI to increase interaction and provide clarity around how to use Earn, and what exclusions were in place.

What we learned

Our updates increased search interactions, lifted the number of offer activations, and reduced support volume.

One notable impact happened when we tested various search placements. By moving the search bar from the header to near the users thumb position, we saw a +115% increase in interaction with search, as well as 35%+ lift in offer taps.