suttondj87@gmail.com | charlotte, nc
SAVINGS TOOLKIT BUCKET DISTRIBUTION
One of Ally's most unique offerings is a digital envelope system inside of the Online Savings Account, Savings Toolkit. We were receiving a fair bit of feedback from customers the moving money within the account but between different buckets was confusing and required too much mental math. To address customer concerns, the UX team was tasked with simplifying this process.
To me, this project is a great example of a time when adding on to existing features that exist and work for some people rather than going back to the drawing board and starting fresh. In the case of this project, I proposed adding a transfers-style bucket-to-bucket option that would help people carry out the task that was in their heads: "I want to move $x.xx from bucket A to bucket B." Testers appreciated the simplicity of this new bucket-to-bucket flow and how it matched up with their mental model and made distributing their money within their account easy and flexible.
For this project, I handled the mobile app, while another UX Designer focused on desktop and a content strategist crafted the content. We were able to conduct a few rounds of user testing during which we gathered feedback to apply to our designs and get them into a state where we could receive final approval.
This project is a personal favorite of mine in that I was able to solve a problem that I had run into myself many times as an Ally customer. I would have to get out a calculator to pay my buckets back if a transfer happened to come from the wrong place, so I have really enjoyed the enhancing the experience for not only Ally mobile app users, but for myself as well.

Bucket distribution is handled through the "distribute" link at the top of the table. This is an existing placement from the original rollout of Savings Toolkit. I didn't change this treatment because users have learned to look there to distribute money so it seemed unnecessary.

When the user taps on the "distribute" link, they are presented with an action sheet prompting them to choose their distribution method. These two options make are concise and clear, helping the user make the right choice for them.

This is the view that allows you to edit all of your bucket balances at once. While some users find this view helpful, others complained that it requires too much mental math. As a part of this project, I also proposed adding percentage labels to the bucket rows, allowing customers to see what percentage of your savings lives within each bucket. Testers liked this enhancement and a few mentioned that this is exactly how they think about their savings.

This view is the new bucket-to-bucket transfers style flow that I created to help people move a certain amount of money from one bucket to another. Testers said that this was huge improvement over the spread view in that it was simple, intuitive and it matched their existing mental model about how they would transfer money within their account.