Nationwide Building Society

Challenge

The UK population had moved out of a ‘crisis’ mode and into a ‘managing’ mindset with rising costs. After changing website content and introducing patterns for ‘managing money’ instead of ‘cost of living’ to support search behaviours, I recognised customers needed unique help for their situation.

Solution

As existing research focused on asking participants ‘if they were in financial difficulty’ instead of feeling it in the present, we needed to learn more about current issues.

Our action was to design and facilitate an interview study, talking to people in different financial situations about their money habits.

What I did

• Collaborated with a UX designer
• Reviewed all existing similar research and organised findings into themes
• Consolidated into draft user needs from existing evidence and identified knowledge gaps
• Created 6 hypotheses to test
• Set up a study with bespoke recruitment through an agency to source quality participants
• Ran a qualitative study with 8 x 60 minute sessions

Diagram of research consolidation and planning steps

• Analysed findings using affinity mapping - grouping common responses across all participants and synthesising into themes, insight statements and 12 key take-aways
• The 12 key take-aways formed 3 topic areas for sharing
• From the 6 hypotheses: 3 were proven correct, 2 were inconclusive and 1 was proven wrong
• The insight, supported by participant quotes, allowed us to understand when users would contact their bank and what services or products would help them

The impact