salary loan

nubank, 2020

Sacrificial Concepts/Conversation Starters Workshop Design and Facilitation Survey Design and Analysis KANO Model Guerrilla Research

 
 

Intro

During my time in the Lending Business Unit at Nubank, I got to team up with Braulio Carli, a Consumer Insights Specialist. In this project, we worked together, setting a new way for the UXR and CI teams to collaborate in the future at our company. As our most important contribution to the main product of this BU, Nubank's Personal Loan, we also had an amazing team of Product Managers, Product Designers, Product Marketing Managers, and others as active participants in the research process.

Our challenge

In typical research, we usually start by figuring out what the problem is and then move on to find a solution. But this project was a bit different. We had a solution in mind that made sense from a business perspective, but we didn't have any real proof that customers would actually use it.

Our job was to set up a study that would give us unbiased evidence showing that this solution was not just good for our business but also something our customers would genuinely benefit from.

 

 

Research Process

Planning

We knew that the team would be eager (even on an unconscious level) to receive answers that greenlit an initiative that had such high potential for revenue, so we focused on designing a foolproof study that:

  1. If it showed that our solution had a real use case and solved a real problem we wanted to understand this problem deeply, so we could design the solution with all the context in mind;

  2. If our solution didn't have much potential in the real world we wanted to have a robust justification as to why and by whom it was rejected so that the organization could make a solid informed decision on if/how to move forward with it or not;

The solution pitched in this project was a type of guarantee you can provide the bank to lower interest rates for a personal loan, so it focused on specific banking mechanics more than solving a well-understood customer's need. Of course, lower interest rates would benefit our customers, but there could be a million ways to arrange this trade-off between guarantees and a discount.

Our chosen approach was to uncover this use case and measure acceptance of the business bet through comparison. As our solution seemed like one in many ways to receive a benefit from a well-established product, we wanted to explore different directions in which the same benefit could be obtained to understand how far are customers willing to go in this information/guarantee transaction.

 

Study Plan & Summary

  • guerrilla fieldwork focused on participants from a previous product marketing experiment;

    mini-user journey deliverable from the experiment participants' use cases;

    primary and secondary data review report;

  • co-creation workshop design and moderation;

    concept refinement;

  • remote interviews with sacrificial concepts/conversation starters;

    KANO model survey;

  • a combination of highlight video clips, qualitative evaluation, and quantitative analysis;

 
 
 
 

Results and Takeaways

Mixed-Methods analysis & report

Results for this project were presented in a deck presentation combining a Kano Model matrix for every concept tested, explaining which quadrant of the analysis they fell into, with highlight reels for each of the concepts from our qualitative sessions. I'm a big fan of including our participants’ expressions: hesitations and moments of positive surprise along with quantitative data. Since we tested so many concepts outside the original scope, we made sure to also tabulate perceptions of each guarantee and feature to future-proof these insights beyond the presentation.

 
 

What the final slides looked like: kano matrix and highlight reels side-by-side. The matrix represents the actual results of the survey, comparing assets vs information vs salary proof as guarantees for a loan.

 

Launched in February 2021

This solution is now available for all eligible customers among 53,9 million clients across Latin America.

Nubank's operational costs on Personal Loan are lower than its competitors due to lower default rates in an analysis by UBS. Reducing operational costs was the business case for this feature in the first place.