JEFFREY MCCORD
Arro’s initial launch included a suite of products: a credit card and a mobile app that manages the card’s activity, but also provides gamified financial literacy training and other tools like budgeting insights.
The overarching goal is to understand and measure customer behavior and to build credit models that more realistically understand it, resulting in a system of credit access more in tune with consumer needs and behaviors than the traditional credit system. Below is the story of the design efforts that went into bringing that dream to life [if a heavily abridged one].
One of my first responsibilities occurring in tandem with the mobile app—and one that is outwardly simple, but will be immensely impactful to Arro’s brand—was to design the company’s logo and the credit card. This was a fun, highly iterative process that explored themes of motion, stability, and accuracy, and one in which I involved the whole company in refining.
I tested hundreds of versions and variables of logotypes and logomarks.
We settled on a set of logotypes and logomarks that combined functions of icons and typeface for multiple contextual uses.
I tested nearly 200 iterations of the credit card design, continuing the thread of motion and exploring themes that were at once minimal, yet kinetic, reaching for a final product that would carry the brand ethos on into the future.
The goal of the Arro app is threefold—to allow users to manage their Arro card activity, to access and implement Arro’s financial literacy tools, and to manage their Arro account. The nature of these areas would evolve as the team came to understand the problems to be solved and the appropriate solutions, via generative and evaluative research and iteration (some of which is omitted here for brevity, but I’d be thrilled to walk you through it in person!).
The work below reveals a process of both problem identification and solution visualization, but ultimately the chiseling away of the unnecessary in order to discover the fundamental design that needed to be built for an effective minimum viable product.
One of my largest, most fundamental tasks at Arro was to build a foundation of user-centered, research-driven design, one based on evidence rather than opinions. Within a small team and a lean startup environment, I would need to leverage all resources available to me in order to gather a critical mass of data upon which we would build customer personas, and ultimately our flagship product.
As one of my first steps, I hosted a company-wide workshop for mining our collective domain expertise, using a journey map framework as the means of documenting our understanding of customers’ problems, experiences, and how Arro might intervene and improve their financial lives.
This map would be remain a living and evolving tool for the company.
Following the domain expertise gathering, I launched a campaign of potential customer interviews in order to buttress the modest amount of documented 1:1 customer research performed by the founders previously, with the goal of arriving at a baseline stable of reference customers, to whom we could return to for ongoing research throughout their journey and build upon with additional customer engagement moving forward. Some of these customers would return for beta testing of the credit card and mobile app months later.
I recruited a cross-functional team of collaborators in both the interview and analysis processes, including Product, Credit, Customer Success, Strategy, and Operations. We discovered a boon of key insights into areas such as financial behaviors, understanding of credit mechanics, financial use of mobile apps, and much more, that would validate and supplement earlier product discovery work performed by the founders.
As a team, we vetted our domain-based knowledge through filter of actual customer data to refine what had been previously been skeletal (and perhaps dubious!) persona assumptions, crafting user models that to help determine what our product should be, to communicate knowledge and build consensus among the team, and to measure the potential success of our design and our product before we actually built it.
Customers need a centralized location to view their holistic account status at app launch—their current balance, available credit, payments due and scheduled, transactions and statements, and snapshot of progress through the learning system.
The centralized Home dash encompass some of the above, and would also introduce new features to customers as they develop, such as budgeting insight tools and new partnership opportunities.
The Credit dash would allow access to payments, transactions, statements, and credit card info. (Note the company rebrand from “Tabpay” to “Arro.”)
Initially the Credit dash was considered discrete and necessary, although this necessity would come into question with later evaluative research.
Sometimes the initial idea is the best one (especially if it’s the simplest). The customer payment flow went through many iterations before settling closer to where it started. The desire for added visual interest—and even playfulness—temporarily clouded the need for straightforward legibility, as seen in the final screen below. Usability testing results would later push this simplicity even further. Autopay functionality would take on a similar form as well.
The Learning System enables customers to grow their credit capacity by growing their financial literacy via a series of activities and actions. The Grow dashboard allows users to view their progress through the journey and manage the available steps. Challenges here included issues of iconography, semantics, density/legibility, and teasing customers through the process via gamification strategies. The MVP shown here would begin to hint at the product vision for future updates in this regard.
As Arro’s mobile app product came into greater focus, I continuously advocated for validation of our hypotheses in order to build a culture of evidenced-based design. Usability testing challenged several key assumptions in multiple areas of the customer experience, and we experimented with how to optimize these areas. I enlisted key collaborators to help build out this evaluative research practice and ran multiple sets of tests over the course of the year.
Given the lean nature and the need-it-yesterday demands of the startup, building out something like a proper design system presented a tricky prospect—to decrease our team velocity considerably in getting a product to market by building a system that would considerably increase our velocity. Eventually, we made the decision to dive in, and with the help of a small team of two designers (I and a contractor) and two engineers, we designed and developed everything from buttons, fields, and progress bars to toasts, navigation tools, list items, asset libraries, and much more.
We also tokenized styles wherever possible, including type, colors, spacing, shadows, borders, and more, using the Tokens Studio for Figma plugin synced to Github as our management tools and source of truth.
As the first design hire, I was charged with tackling a big variety of tasks associated with branding identity, web presence, internal Customer Success admin tools, and collateral materials associated with our products and business development. Among them, I designed and built our first MVP website handling waitlist signups as well as all of its associated visual assets, and I continued to design further iterations of the site as the company matured.
Among Arro’s visual assets were a library of illustration components that I helped develop, maintain, and push forward, including the brand mascot, dubbed “Arti.” These assets conveyed a sense of playfulness and trustworthiness, as Arti would act as the customers’ guide through their financial journey.
The Arro credit card is currently operational, and the mobile app is undergoing beta testing with select users. Vision sessions are also underway for the next evolution of the app, with potential implementation of a choose-your-own-adventure form of the Learning System and a "freemium" version of app, lowering barriers to onboarding new users and providing teaser product features with real-world benefits.
