NewDay: Aqua Coach Steps (ACS)
New Feature Development (End-to-end)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.
"What Next?":
Introducing Aqua Coach Steps
Presentation Deck
Awards & Recognitions
Introduction & Background: The Journey to Actionable Coaching
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
Collaboration Workshops
Our design process was highly collaborative, centered around a multi-stage workshop approach to ensure alignment and gather diverse expertise early. The process was structured as follows:
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.
Workshop with Squad & Brand: With a clear plan, we moved into workshopping mid-fi wireframes. This involved two key groups:
The Development Squad ('Groot'): We engaged the engineers early to get critical technical insights, ensure feasibility, and collaboratively exercise empathy for the end-user.
The Brand Team: Early involvement with the brand team allowed us to get initial feedback on visuals and copy, ensuring the design would feel cohesive and communicate effectively within the Aqua brand identity.
Refine & Iterate: The feedback and insights from these workshops were then used to refine the concepts and move into higher-fidelity designs.
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:
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.
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.
Collaboration Workshops
Our design process was highly collaborative, centered around a multi-stage workshop approach to ensure alignment and gather diverse expertise early. The process was structured as follows:
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.
Workshop with Squad & Brand: With a clear plan, we moved into workshopping mid-fi wireframes. This involved two key groups:
The Development Squad ('Groot'): We engaged the engineers early to get critical technical insights, ensure feasibility, and collaboratively exercise empathy for the end-user.
The Brand Team: Early involvement with the brand team allowed us to get initial feedback on visuals and copy, ensuring the design would feel cohesive and communicate effectively within the Aqua brand identity.
Refine & Iterate: The feedback and insights from these workshops were then used to refine the concepts and move into higher-fidelity designs.
Review
Following the initial ideation phase, 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.