NewDay:
Aqua Coach Steps (ACS)
Driven by User Insight, Delivered as an MVP.
For many customers, improving a credit score is a mysterious and intimidating goal, with no clear path on what actions to take. The 'Aqua Coach Steps' project was designed to solve this problem by transforming credit building into a supportive, guided experience. The feature demystifies the process by breaking it down into a simple, step-by-step journey with clear "levels" and achievable monthly "steps." By completing these tasks, users can see tangible progress towards real rewards like credit limit increases, turning confusion into a clear, motivating path forward.
My role as product designer was to craft this journey to feel intuitive and stress-free, empowering users with the confidence that they are taking the right actions.
Introducing
Aqua Coach Steps
Presentation Deck
The Context and Challenges from the Project Journey
Understanding the context in which it unfolds is key to appreciating its complexities. In this deep dive, we explore the unique challenges faced throughout the project journey—highlighting obstacles, decision points, and lessons learned that shaped the outcome. By dissecting these details, we gain valuable insights that can guide future initiatives toward greater success.
Introduction & Background
NewDay's strategic vision is to create a unified Credit Coach Foundation—a scalable, brand-agnostic platform designed to empower all our customers, across every brand, with the tools to improve their financial health. This initiative directly supports our business goal to be the #1 Near-Prime lender in the UK by making our products more valuable and "sticky."
Our first step towards this vision was the launch of Aqua Coach, an informational feature exclusive to the Aqua brand. While successful in providing visibility into credit scores for our 900,000 Aqua users, it highlighted a key business limitation: its non-scalable design prevented us from serving the other 68% of NewDay customers. More importantly, it revealed a deeper user need—not just to see their score, but to understand how to improve it.
This proposal focuses on Aqua Coach Steps, the critical next evolution. It's an initiative to transform the passive Aqua Coach into an active, guided experience. By testing this actionable coaching model on a single brand first, we aim to prove its effectiveness in increasing user engagement, improving financial well-being, and strengthening customer loyalty. This project serves as a vital pilot, with the ultimate business goal of creating a proven template that can be scaled across the entire NewDay portfolio through the Credit Coach Foundation.
Hypothesis
We believe that by enhancing the current Aqua Coach feature with a guided, step-by-step journey ("Aqua Coach Steps"), we can empower Aqua customers with the knowledge and confidence to actively improve their credit health. We hypothesize that providing clear, manageable actions and showing progress towards tangible benefits (like potential credit limit increases) will significantly increase user engagement, improve financial outcomes, and deepen customer loyalty to the Aqua brand.
Design Goal
Our primary design goal is to create an intuitive and engaging user experience that transforms the abstract concept of credit building into a clear, visually rewarding, and stress-free journey. The design must seamlessly integrate the new "Steps" and "Levels" system into the existing Aqua Coach hub, using clear visual language, positive reinforcement, and a supportive tone to guide users. Ultimately, the design should empower customers by making them feel confident, in control, and motivated to take positive steps towards their financial goals.
Product Requirements
The core requirement is to build a new "Steps" feature within the existing Aqua Coach experience. This feature must be able to:
Present Actionable Steps: Display a series of clear, simple, and achievable monthly tasks that are known to positively influence credit health.
Track User Progress: Implement a "levels" system to visually track a user's progress as they complete steps, providing a sense of accomplishment.
Provide Positive Reinforcement: Offer encouraging messaging and visual cues upon completion of steps to motivate continued engagement.
Connect to Tangible Benefits: Clearly communicate how progressing through levels can lead to potential rewards, such as credit limit increases, to create a compelling user incentive.
Seamlessly Integrate: The feature must feel like a natural and intuitive part of the existing Aqua Coach hub, not a separate experience.
Business Impact and Goal
The primary goal is to evolve Aqua Coach from an informational tool into an actionable coaching platform. This initiative serves as a crucial first step towards the broader "Credit Coach" vision, allowing us to test and refine a deeper level of user engagement within a single brand. By helping customers actively improve their financial health, we aim to increase the "stickiness" and value of the Aqua product. The immediate business impact will be increased monthly active engagement with Aqua Coach, improved customer satisfaction and financial well-being, and a reduction in customer churn, all of which strengthen the Aqua brand and provide a proven model for future expansion to other NewDay products.
Design Exploration, Ideation & Execution
Areas I led in:
Define Goals & Plans
Benchmarking: Motivations & Incentification
From Ideation to MVP
Collaborative Workshop: Alignment & Visibility
User Research: Understanding & Perceived Value
Design Exploration
Design Handoff
Final Alignment & Rollout phase
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Define Goals & Plan
The process began with foundational workshops involving the Product Owner, Product Analyst, and Product Specialist. In these sessions, we aligned on the core user problem, defined business goals, and established a clear plan of action.
In Scope:
Development of the "Steps" and "Levels" system exclusively for the Aqua brand.
Creation of the "Main Hub" and "Steps Details" pages within the existing Aqua Coach.
Integration of an initial set of predefined credit-building steps.
Out of Scope:
Rollout to other NewDay brands (e.g., Bip, Fluid). This will be considered for future phases based on the success of this pilot.
Development of advanced gamification features beyond the core "Levels" system.
Fundamental changes to the existing Credit Score, Simulator, or Report modules.
Constraints:
The project must work within the existing Aqua technical architecture.
The release timeline is dependent on the 'Groot' squad's availability and is aligned with the proposed phased rollout.
Benchmarking
To inform our design strategy, we conducted benchmark research into financial wellness and educational apps within the fintech and banking sectors. Our analysis of motivation theory and competitor execution revealed several key insights.
Lofi wireframe
This research phase was not just about gathering insights; it was also a generative process. It gave us the chance to sketch out various lo-fi wireframes, exploring different ideas for the feature's structure, information display, and visual hierarchy. These early concepts, inspired by best-in-class examples, were foundational in shaping Aqua Coach Steps to be an encouraging and genuinely empowering experience.
From Ideation to Structuring MVP
Following the initial ideation, I sat down with my Product Manager to translate our high-level concepts into a tangible product structure. In this highly collaborative phase, we crafted and refined the product requirements, moving from abstract goals to a defined user experience. Through whiteboard sessions and sketching, we established the key screens needed for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This resulted in two core pages.
The "Main Hub": This serves as the central dashboard for the Aqua Coach Steps experience, displaying the user's current level, their progress, an overview of the current "step," and links to existing credit score tools.
The "Steps Details" Screen: This page provides more in-depth information about a specific step, outlining what the user needs to do and why it is important for their credit health.
We also broke down the interface into essential components needed for these screens, including the Header, a reusable Step component, the Levels progress visual, and T&Cs. This crucial process transformed our validated ideas into a concrete architectural plan for development.
Collaborative Workshop:
Alignment & Visibility
Our design process was highly collaborative, centered around a multi-stage workshop approach to ensure alignment and gather diverse expertise early. Workshop with Squad, Design Team & Brand: With a clear plan, we moved into workshopping mid-fi wireframes.
Structured Progress & Goal Setting:
Leading financial apps translate abstract goals like "improving credit" into tangible, visual journeys. Using progress bars, milestones, or levels provides users with a clear sense of accomplishment and a structured path to their objective.
Actionable Financial 'Nudges':
The most effective educational tools are shifting from dense articles to providing small, specific, and timely actions. These "nudges" guide users toward positive financial habits without overwhelming them, a core principle we've adopted for our "Steps" feature.
Celebrating Financial Wins:
Successful financial wellness apps build user confidence by celebrating small but important positive behaviours, such as making consistent on-time payments. This positive reinforcement creates a motivating feedback loop.
Transparent Educational Pathways:
The best platforms build trust by providing a clear journey. Users always understand their current position, the next concrete action to take, and the long-term benefit of doing so.
Learnings: It confirmed a clear market standard for driving user motivation and incentivizing positive financial behavior. The most successful platforms guide users through structured, actionable journeys rather than simply presenting data. They leverage key principles like breaking down large goals into manageable 'steps,' providing positive reinforcement, and offering a transparent pathway to tangible rewards. This educational and encouraging approach informed our decision to sketch out various lo-fi wireframes centered around these concepts, ensuring that the foundational structure and information hierarchy of Aqua Coach Steps were built on proven methods for empowering users.
1. Workshop with the Development Squad ('Groot')
We engaged the engineers early by workshopping mid-fi wireframes of all three design options. This was critical for gaining technical insights into the feasibility of each approach, discussing potential implementation challenges, and ensuring the development team could exercise empathy for the end-user's experience from the beginning.
2. Workshop with the Brand Team
Early involvement with the brand team was vital for shaping the feature's identity. We held specific ideation sessions to discuss the visual depiction of our mascot, 'Aki', and brainstormed how to visually represent abstract concepts like 'Levels' and 'Steps' in a way that felt motivating, engaging, and perfectly aligned with the Aqua brand.
3. Design Critiques & Iteration
We held regular design critique sessions with the wider design team to get unbiased feedback, fresh insights, and to align on our progress with peers. This process helped identify any unseen dependencies or inconsistencies with other ongoing projects.
Outcome: The combined feedback from all workshops and critiques led to Option 2 emerging as the clear winner. This approach prioritizes showing users the actionable 'Step' first, with their 'Level' as a secondary, rewarding element. This crucial decision allowed us to move forward into higher-fidelity design with a validated, user-centric direction.
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User Research: Understanding & Perceived Value
To understand user perception and gauge the value of our proposed design, we conducted a remote unmoderated user study with 12 UK credit card holders representing a mix of household incomes. The primary goal was to assess the comprehensibility of the "steps" and "levels" concept. Using an interactive prototype and a think-aloud protocol, we tasked users with exploring the feature and gathered feedback via a post-task survey.
Key Learnings from Research:
Clarity Drives Empowerment: The research confirmed a high level of understanding. Users felt confident and in control with the simple "step-by-step" guidance, with one stating, "this is a really good way for me to increase my credit score and actually see it happening."
Supportive Design Increases Value: The visual design and encouraging tone were perceived as "comforting" and "warm," which directly contributed to the feature's perceived value by reducing the anxiety associated with credit management.
High Perceived Value & Helpfulness: The feature was overwhelmingly seen as highly valuable and empowering. The research validated that the core "steps" concept was not only understood but also loved, as it provided a clear and helpful path forward.
Recommendations from Research: The findings gave us clear direction to lean into the "steps" concept and maintain the supportive tone. The primary actionable recommendation was to implement minor visual tweaks, such as using color to add emphasis to key disclaimers and benefits, to further enhance comprehension and value.
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Design Explorations
Taking the feedback from our collaborative workshops, I began a phase of focused design explorations. This first involved creating multiple mid-fi wireframes to test different approaches to the information hierarchy and overall page structure, leading to the structured options presented back to stakeholders.
An area of exploration was the UI for the "Levels" progress bar; I experimented with various visual treatments and placements—such as positioning it prominently at the top of the hub versus integrating it further down the page—to determine the most intuitive and motivating presentation for the user.
A second, critical phase of exploration focused on defining the user experience for various edge cases and error states. It was vital to ensure the feature felt robust and communicated clearly, even when the primary content was unavailable. I designed specific UI states and crafted clear, empathetic copy for scenarios such as:
No Step Available: For when a user has completed their step for the month ("Your next step is coming soon!...") or when the step is temporarily unavailable due to a technical issue ("Your step is unavailable...").
Data Unavailability: For when either the user's 'Level' or both 'Steps & Levels' are temporarily unavailable due to an error.
User Ineligibility: For new users still within their initial 6-month profiling period ("...we are working on your Aqua Coach profile...") or for users excluded from the feature, providing clear explanations and directing them to support where appropriate.
Design Handoff
To translate the final, validated designs into a buildable product, a comprehensive handoff package was prepared for the development team.
User Journey Maps: Detailed visual diagrams outlining the complete user flow for iOS and ADR, including all interactions, decision points, and the various edge cases and error states that were designed.
Design Specifications: A complete set of high-fidelity mockups in Figma for iOS and ADR, detailing all visual elements, typography, color codes, spacing, and component states. This provided developers with a precise blueprint for the UI. This also includes small screen sizes to ensure that all bases are covered.
Copy Request: A formal copy request was submitted to the brand team with all drafted text for the interface, ensuring the final messaging was not only clear and helpful but also perfectly aligned with the supportive and empathetic Aqua tone of voice.
Core screen component: The Aqua Coach Steps experience is structured around a few core screens and components designed for clarity and ease of use. A tabbed navigation allows users to switch between the new action-oriented 'Steps & Levels' section and the existing informational 'Credit Tools' tab. This includes:
Main Hub: This is the central dashboard where users see their current 'Level', a visual progress bar, interactive 'Steps' cards for the current tasks, and a swipeable 'Levels' carousel to explore the benefits of advancing.
Steps Details Page: Accessed by tapping "Take a step," this page provides in-depth information on a specific task. It uses an expandable accordion structure to answer key user questions: "What do I need to do?", "Why is this step important?", and "How does this affect my level?".
Credit Tools & Score Information: The existing informational modules, such as the Score Simulator and Credit Report, are housed in their own dedicated tab, ensuring they are easily accessible without cluttering the new action-oriented journey.
Interactive Prototype
To effectively test our design concepts and gather user feedback, I developed a high-fidelity interactive prototype. This prototype simulated the core user journey and included key interactive components such as a main navigation with tabs for 'Steps & Levels' and 'Credit Tools.' It featured a 'Welcome to Aqua Coach' dropdown to introduce the experience, interactive 'Steps' cards, a dynamic 'Levels' progress bar, and a swipeable 'Levels' carousel to explore the benefits of advancing. The primary user flow was fully functional, allowing participants to click the 'Take a Step' button on a card and navigate to a detailed 'Steps Details' page. This details page used an expandable accordion structure to clearly present information, answering "What do I need to do?", "Why is this step important?", and "How does this affect my level?". This approach provided a realistic experience for design handover and showcases how it is intended to interact.
Final Alignment
Following the initial ideation, design explorations, and research validation, the design underwent multiple stakeholder alignment and feedback sessions and in-depth design critiques. As a direct result of this comprehensive evaluation process, the initial feature scope was simplified to focus on core functionality, which enabled us to formulate the high-level, phased release plan based on these clarified priorities.
High-Level Release Plan
The rollout of Aqua Coach Steps will be conducted in a phased approach to manage development, gather feedback, and iterate effectively. The plan is structured as follows:
Phase 1: Foundation & Entry Points (Release 1)
This initial phase focuses on establishing the foundational technical elements and experimenting with various user entry points to the feature, including a welcome interstitial, account summary banner, and a "More" menu item.
Phase 2: Eligibility & Communication (Release 2)
This release will introduce the eligibility check for the feature and will be supported by email communications to inform existing users about the new capabilities within Aqua Coach.
Phase 3: Core 'Steps' MVP Launch (Releases 3 & 4)
This is the core launch of the 'Steps' feature. Release 3 will introduce the "Level Zero / Level One" framework and the ability to view past steps. Release 4 will enable the primary user action: the ability to "Take a step." This phase will also integrate productive articles from our content management system to support users.
Phase 4 & Beyond: Experimentation & Gamification (Releases 5 & 6)
Following the MVP launch, these future releases will focus on optimization and enhancement. Release 5 will involve First Time Onboarding (FTO) experiments to improve adoption. Release 6 will explore gamification experiments to drive sustained engagement and motivation.
Final Thoughts
While the 'Aqua Coach Steps' feature appears simple on the surface, its development was a complex process of balancing user needs, technical constraints, and business objectives. A significant challenge was navigating stakeholder questions about the project's initial value and collaboratively defining a focused MVP. My primary role was to simplify this complexity and design an easy entry point for development, allowing us to quickly get the feature into the hands of real users. This pilot is strategically crucial; its success is intended to provide clear, data-backed validation of the feature's real value, opening the gateway for a more extensive financial education project and, eventually, the realization of the brand-agnostic 'Credit Coach' platform.