We joined the Honest Dollar team at Goldman Sachs to help sharpen their unique solution for people most in need of a retirement savings plan. In order to differentiate Honest Dollar from the rest of the market, we knew we needed to combine the strength of Goldman’s dedication to its customers with a product offering they can trust.
Honest Dollar is a Goldman Sachs product focused on creating an accessible approach to retirement savings. The company launched with a vision of creating a path to retirement accessible enough that consumers can enroll and save using their smartphone.
Honest Dollar’s focus was on increasing new customer acquisition. In order to do that, we needed to clarify their target market and understand how that market was responding to their existing product.
During the research phase, we sought to pave a path for continuous innovation towards Goldman Sachs strategic goals and objectives. We outlined key performance indicators for product and business success across their teams in order to mark performance and adoption, with room to iterate where necessary.
We discovered that confusion over how and why to invest in retirement causes fear, which leads to paralysis when facing the decision of whether or not to save.
We designed our research engagement to give us a 360 understanding of Honest Dollar’s product in the current market landscape. Our research provided personas, expectations, and identified the needs of people who don’t have the opportunity to benefit from a corporate savings plan, primarily freelancers, self-employed, and small business owners and employees.
Establishing trust was our cornerstone of Honest Dollar’s brand voice and tone. We created a clean, modern design for their product that prioritized accessibility, used “real” language rather than financial jargon, and incorporated financial education into the workflow.
Product design focused on streamlined simplicity and clear displays of complicated financial data. Finances can feel overwhelming, so we focused on showing only the information needed for making decisions.
Introducing Honest Dollar’s products to consumers in a comprehensive, accessible way helped them feel comfortable taking the next step to sign up. Video and motion graphics were simple to consume, and helped users understand which product offerings were right for them.
Our work with Honest Dollar uncovered some users’ psychological barriers to their product, which we were then able to strategically address to help bring in new customers in their target market. This extended into our execution of design and content, which created a more accessible, easier-to-understand final product. We spun up a dedicated team to make sure we were deeply integrated in their process, building a solid relationship based on communication & commitment to the product and their core business objectives.
