READYSAVE 529 APP

Roles : UX Strategist, Researcher, Information architect, Art & marketing direction for Ugift, Copy writer

Ascensus provides record-keeping and education savings support for 26 states and 6,500,000+ savers. We launched an app 3 years ago to meet basic consumer needs and help drive contributions.

In our initial user tests, we identified peer comparisons as a desirable, but tricky feature to implement. Our MVP was this chart that provides context for what others are saving. The next iteration of this would be to test more personalized data points and set a specific target.

Impact

  • Peer comparison drives account owners to contribute about twice as much to their accounts in the month that they start using the app.

  • Prominence, positioning, and reduced friction of Ugift drives ~80% increase in gift contributions in the month that account owners start using the app.

ReadySAVE 529 app dashboard

 
Image of an app on a phone. Image of a little girl  reaching toward a bar just overhead. Cation says "It's tougher to reach your goals alone. We make it easy to get help from those you love." The call to action is "Give your savings a boost."

Promotion for friends and family funding option called Ugift

Enrollment

The next major feature for the app was to add the ability to open a new account, enrollment. After reviewing data for the desktop experience, we discovered that the previous redesign resulted in a drop in recurring contributions. Our hypothesis was that they had consolidated the steps too much, as the checkbox for making a contribution recurring was getting lost in the UI. Our solve was to create 2 distinct steps: initial funding and recurring contributions. These values often varied widely anyway.

Impact : About 40% more users set up recurring contributions in the app than those who enroll on the desktop site.

Stakeholder presentation slide with options for updating the enrollment flo.

Initial contributions

Recurring contributions

 

AcCESSING Enrollment

In order to keep development costs low, we have one app that serves all our different plans. In the market, the plans are branded by the state and the end consumer doesn’t have much exposure to Ascensus at all. Like the Retirement app, we use the neutral ReadySAVE branding to ease the user into the app and then brand the experience once we know. It’s a little convoluted, but still preferable to managing over 26 apps.

The diagram was a quick exploration of how we might incorporate branding and where in the flow.