Redesigning the Capital Landing Page
Minimizing dropout at the top of the product funnel
Role: Lead designer
Focus: UI/UX, Research
Timeline: February 2019 — August 2019
Status: Shipped
Impact: $40M increase in loan disbursement per year
CONTEXT
About QuickBooks Capital
QuickBooks Capital is a service that provides business funding for eligible QuickBooks customers — and has served tens of thousands of small businesses for a total loan distribution amount of well over $1B.
My Responsibilities
I worked as the design lead on the Capital Growth mission. I partnered closely with my content strategist, researcher, product manager, engineers, marketing, and compliance team members to investigate how to reduce the amount of dropout we were seeing in our product funnel.
Why redesign the Landing Page?
The biggest opportunity area in our product has always been at the top of the funnel. We continue to see a significant amount of drop out in our experience on the Landing Page and even within Application. The two metrics that we have been closely monitoring are:
Current Experience
Challenge
90% of users who visit the Capital Landing Page drop out of the experience and do not begin an application.
PROCESS
Research
We reached out to a subset of customers who had been dropping out of the Capital Landing Page experience and conducted user interviews to better understand their behavior. I also worked closely with the Marketing team to set up surveying in order to learn what benefits our customers might be looking for in a business funding product.
User Interview Insights
Users felt that there was a lack of information around our product
1. There was no clear understanding of how our Capital service even worked.
2. There was fear of applying due to unanswered assumptions. (Impact on credit score, etc.)
3. There was limited thinking in how business funding can be used to benefit them.
There is a negative connotation around business funding
1. Asking for help or money is perceived as a sign of weakness.
2. They don’t want to take on debt.
3. They don’t think they’ll be approved.
Survey Insights
Design Principles
Principle 1: Inform with clarity and full transparency
How might we educate users about how our service works and how it will benefit them?
Principle 2: Provide an element of play and personalization
How might we allow users to play around with numbers so that the experience is more meaningful to them?
Principle 3: Don’t leave the users with potential assumptions
How might we prevent users from walking away from our experience with unanswered questions?
Success Metrics
Increase Capital annual loan disbursement volume by $24M per year
Design Variations
This version allows users to interact with a savings calculator at the top of the page
This version leans more on product benefits and leverages a static sample loan card to avoid confusion with numbers
FINAL DESIGN
Desktop Web
During user testing, our users resonated most with this version. Many believed that this one lays out the information they are looking for as a customer (benefits, how the product works) and also enjoyed the fact that they could calculate a sample loan with meaningful numbers.
Mobile Web
Designing for mobile web was a huge improvement for our Landing Page experience. In the past, we hardly saw any traffic from mobile users. After making this mobile responsive, we noticed a 200% increase in user engagement with our experience on mobile.
FAST FOLLOWS
Application dropout around Social Security Number
We noticed some that users were still dropping out of our experience during the application. Through data, we were able to identify that the largest deterrent to application completion was the Social Security Number. In order to reassure our customers, I included some additional content to the designs as a fast follow-up.
Frequently Asked Questions
Through clickstream data, we also identified that our customers were engaging a lot with our FAQs. Unfortunately our previous experience around frequently asked questions was simply a long list of 40+ questions. I worked closely with one of our engineers to come up with a new design to help organize and improve this experience.
RESULTS AND IMPACT
Application start rate
After the redesign of the Landing Page, we saw a consistent 6% increase in the application start rate, from 10% to 16%.
Application completion rate
With the simple addition of content around our Social Security Number text field in our application, we saw a 5% increase in application complete rate.
Loan Disbursement Volume
The combined efforts of the Landing Page and Application enhancements are on a trajectory of increasing our Capital loan disbursement volume by $40M per year.
LEADERSHIP SUPPORT
CEO Sasan Goodarzi during QuickBooks Connect
Each year Intuit hosts an annual conference for accountants and small business owners where we showcase our exciting developments and improvements. Our CEO Sasan showed strong support for our QuickBooks Capital product as a game-changing service which leverages rich customer data and machine learning for the benefit of our users.
LEARNINGS & REFLECTION
Move fast
In the end, it wasn’t a matter of creating the perfect landing page in one shot that would convince all users to apply for Capital business funding. Rather, we leaned on rapid A/B testing and leveraged data to continuously uncover opportunities such as the application (SSN).