Redesigning and Realigning Yodlee PersonalFinance
Since launching in July 2006, Yodlee PersonalFinance has won Online Banking Report's "Best of the Web" award for the Bank of America branded version, and spawned numerous "copycat" online banking web applications.
Where it Started
Yodlee's personal financial management application started as a single page "dashboard" where a consumer could enter usernames and passwords for all of their financial accounts and a number of other web services accounts such as email, news, and evites and see aggregated information all on one page.
Yodlee was really the first "mashup" alternative to logging in to a dozen or more websites.
It was a huge hit among the tech-savvy, "financial hobbyist" crowd. All 500 of them. OK, so the picture wasn't that grim. But it was clear that we had a tremendous amount of useful technology that wasn't seeing its' full potential because it wasn't approachable to the wider mainstream audience.
The Goal
- Answer consumer's basic questions: "Where is my money going?" and "Am I spending more than I'm saving?"
- Focus on simplicity, approachability, and a coherent experience
How We Did It
The research: We were lucky to have Bill Harris, the former CEO of Intuit, on our board to provide a lot of "been there, done that" insights into the Quicken audience. Through our customers we had access to a variety of secondary research.
The demo: To keep a unified product vision across the entire Yodlee organization, I kicked off the product development process with a click-through demo that "told the story". You can watch a Flash demo version at Yodlee MoneyCenter Flash demo.
The iteration cycle:
- Tell the story to consumers and customers and listen for questions
- Revise the demo, cutting and adding features
- Review high-level functional specifications in a big group to keep everyone involved
- Tie all feature requests and suggestions back to the design goals: simplicity, approachability, cohesive experience
The prototype gave the entire team - product management, engineering, QA, and sales a sense of what we were working towards. As actual code was written, we released nightly builds to an alpha environment so everyone could see the final product coming together.
