Quicken | Loan Tools

Quicken has been a trusted name in personal finance to millions of people for over 30 years. For most of that time, there was a singular focus on the Windows application, with an only relatively recent effort to bring these tools to the Mac. While the Mac app supported the display of loan payments, we wanted to offer a set of tools that enabled a user to learn more about their debt.

During this project, I gathered all the knowledge I could about the complex world of loans and mortgages so that Quicken customers wouldn’t need to. I spoke to users throughout the project to learn their thoughts on loans, goals, and strategies about loans.

In the end, I was able to deliver a set of tools that not only show basic loan payments, but they lift the curtain to reveal what a loan actually costs, while tracking your equity along the way. These tools even help monitor your current payoff trend and model forecasts for new ones.

The very first step of the process was to understand how Quicken for Windows handled loan data. Since one of the requirements of this project was, at a minimum, to match the features in the Windows app, this was a no-brainer.

The loan management screen in Quicken for Windows appeared informative at first glance, but upon closer inspection, some of the data was not very useful, or even clear. For example, the payoff graph in the image below consists of a single line that only indicates the start and projected end dates.

After evaluating the Windows product, I sought out detailed information on the mechanics of different types of loans, with an emphasis on mortgages. Though very complex, this information was necessary to understand before I can start talking to potential users about their loans.

I interviewed some of Quicken’s customers to understand their behaviors and practices with their loans. Some of the sample questions I asked are:

• Have you ever looked at an amortization or pay down schedule for your loan? If yes, why? How did you use that information?
• Do you pay more than the minimum payment when repaying your home mortgage? If yes, why? Please tell us in detail about how you made this decision?
• Do you pay attention to the proportion of principal versus interest in each payment? On an annual basis? If yes, why?

Their responses were helpful in that I identified common trends and concerns among most of the interviewees. For example, users dislike paying interest (of course), and they wanted information about their actual interest payments more upfront. I shared my findings with the Product Manager, developers and design manager to agree upon a more solid set of feature requirements and goals to work toward.

I started out with some grayscale sketches in order to figure out how to represent the important data in our “Loan Progress” screen. This was a rapid iterative and open process as I shared each version with the team for feedback. Remember, the images below were created very early in the design process and are not refined.

While working on the Mac version of the “What If’ tool, a feature that projects how interest and time savings if additional payments are made, I wanted to understand how to best represent the graphs. I gathered a few graph concepts and created a test on usertesting.com for feedback.

By the time I was ready for user testing of a full set of features, I had already validated user needs and some preferences regarding the display of their loans. I put together a clickable InVision prototype and recruited testers to interact with the designs.

I was really looking to see if the participants understood what they were looking at. I asked follow up questions about each component so I could learn how our participants interpreted the data. I credit the early research for the positive feedback the designs have gotten in this round of user tests. The graphical representations and display of loan data were interpreted the same way we hoped, with some minor feedback that led to small tweaks.

Better loan support in the Mac was one of the most requested features by Quicken users. Many of these users own a Mac but still maintain a Windows installation just to run Quicken. Since a major goal of the Mac team is to increase switchers from the Windows platform, this feature was considered high priority.

Shortly after these features were shipped, the Quicken Mac team received feedback, reviews, and emails that indicated a high level of satisfaction with the new loan tools. Most importantly, many Windows users were able to permanently switch to the Mac version. This feature contributed to the growing Mac user base and exceeded company growth goals for the year.

Why stop now? Check out more of my work