Brighte

Overview

Brighte is a “buy now, pay later” financier for residential solar, batteries and other sustainable products and also general home improvements. All of them through different loan plans. 

Currently, the main customer acquisition channel is through its vendors’ networking. And this limited way to engage current customers and potential new customers were some of the reasons why we came on board to find solutions that could help with these limitations and other current issues.

Bright purpose is to have a million Brighte powered homes by 2026.

The Challenge

Bright is looking to scale the business by pivoting its strategy to directly target the end consumer. To achieve this, the company has developed two key strategies pillar for the consumer app:

1. Increase self-serve actions:
   The first is to empower their customers to self-serve with a range of basic administrative tasks to reduce costs in their customer service team, and also drive higher downloads and engagement with the app.
   

2. Drive a higher rate of re-use with their finance customers:
   Their goal is to be the first place people go to when they decide they want to make sustainable upgrades to their homes. Bright wants the app as a touch point which drives greater “stickiness” with the brand, and extends relationships with their customers.
   

Bright is hoping to understand more about their customers' pain points and needs in order to identify the best way to create this re-use pathway.

The Solution

As a result, we developed a feature that could help users to find real customers with similar household compositions to theirs and with real stories that could help them to make the decision about their next step in the process to convert their houses into sustainable homes. At the same time, this solution would be helping Brighte to generate stronger connections with their current customers, increasing their frequency of visits to the app, becoming regular users of the company services and bringing efficiency to the different departments involved in the contact with their customers.

Roles & Responsibilities

The project was developed with the double diamond process (Discover, Define, Develop & Deliver) with a project manager overviewing it. I was in charge of the development phase. However, I was involved in all the steps and decisions through the whole project.

It was a very collaborative process and despite that we divided the project into the 4 different steps previously mentioned, the whole team had to work extensively to have a very deep research and define content. It was an initial request from the client as they have other features to improve within the App and our research and defining processes would be great help for these other projects running inside the company.

Users & Audience

The first approach to the research phase was to try to understand the possible competitors offering similar products to Brighte. Companies like Plenti, Gateway and Commonwealth were chosen because they offer green loans and we wanted to understand how they manage the relationship with their customers, steps needed for the applications, offers and procedures used in these types of loans.

We started with a comparative analysis  with companies like AfterPay and Klarna as they are offering similar types of loan “buy now, pay later''. We wanted to understand their business model and the way that they communicate and interact with their customers.

At this point we were with enough understanding about the financial options for these types of loans, but we were lacking in knowledge about renewable energy and their benefits.  For that reason, we decided to do a very deep research about sustainable products. We wanted to understand the whole concept, the difference between products, their benefits and people’s motivations to move into these kinds of resources. 

After collecting this information, we thought that we were needing one last piece of research in relation to energy apps to understand their structure and the main features available in these types of applications. We analysed the apps from Tesla, Origin, AGL, Amber and PowerShop. This last research helped us to find some advantages that we thought we could be using in the ideation process. We analysed the best and poor capabilities from the companies providing Green Loans:

The Findings

Some of the most relevant insights gathered during the interviews to Non-Brighte customers are related to:

“The Money Savvy Homeowner needs to have a clear idea of the return on investment, so they have a good understanding about the benefits to their future finances”.

With our problem statement defined, we started to work in the How Might We Statements. We decided to develop the same process used in the formulation of the problem statement as it was a very effective way to come up with ideas, filtering them and choosing the strongest ones. So, after some discussions and deliberations about possible statements, the most relevant points in all the ideas that we came up with were:

At the end of the process “Confidence” was the most common and strongest point that we had from the different statements and after some deliberation, we decided to use two statements that were quite similar in between:

For more information about the Define Process please click here

The Design Process

After having great success with the processes to define the “problem statement” and the “how might we” statements, where every single integrant of the team was developing their own ideas and then combining them with the rest of the group ideas to come up with stronger and more solid concepts. I decided to do some research to try to find a design studio with similar structure to our previous exercises that could help us to have another successful result during the ideation.

How Was The Process?

It is important for us to understand how the process for the ideation was to understand why we arrived to our final idea.

We started with some quick individual sketching where we are putting all our ideas. Once we had those ideas, we had the option to choose one or more of those ideas and explore it individually as a unique idea to be presented later on to the rest of the group. With this step we were giving the option to those first ideas to have some evolution without discarding any of them. The purpose was to give to every single participant the option to improve something that initially didn’t have enough shape to make it relevant. 

Once each of us had that refined individual idea ready, it was presented to the group for some feedback and critiques. We discussed them to make sure that all of them were aligned with our problem statement and with at least one of our HMW statements. The purpose of the feedback was to receive constructive opinions that could help us to refine even more those ideas and to give to the rest of the group more bases to keep evolving the ideas that we were working on. At this point every single integrant was not only thinking in our own ideas, we were also thinking about how to use the ideas from the others to combine them and keep evolving into the strong idea that we were expecting to come out with.

After combining ideas that have been through some filters, we started to create new ideas where we were mixing and using the most relevant ideas from the presentations.

Then we started to prioritise which ideas were the most valuable and strong for the project. Again, taking into consideration the different statements and “The Money Savvy Homeowner”. From this last filter from the sketching process we came out with four points that were the strongest within the group: 

With those four strong ideas defined, we went to work on another round of sketches where we were combining them and checking if they were providing solutions to our “How Might We” statements. Most of those new ideas developed were related to “People’s Experiences” and this concept had a very strong direction towards video content. The idea of the video content split up the team and some of us were rejecting it. We were discussing if that concept was strong enough to help us to solve the problem statements.
In fact the idea was strongly linked to the two insights addressed in the problem statements (information needed / benefit financially). So, to resolve the division within the group, we decided to have a new research, but this time was about how video content can help brands reinforce connection with customers. 

The findings during this research, showed us that the use of video content is related with the way people can perceive and receive the stories and how they can connect with the brand with the following benefits:

Finance is a topic that touches every aspect of a consumer’s life and our user’s journey in finding a sustainable home product is one that could be brought to life in a video. We are not just telling the user the benefit of Brighte’s products or why they might be better than competitors, the purpose is to show through authentic storytelling how Brighte can help solve a specific problem for them and help them to make the decision. And on top of that, all that content could be used in Brighte's social platform to reinforce the message to other customers, including potential ones.

Now with the team finally on the same page and with the task flow ready, we reviewed the brief and we decided to create a feature that could help users to make their decision about their next sustainable product. However, we needed to trigger an action from them to go ahead in the search for the vendors and application for the loan. For that reason, we decided to link this new feature with two current features available in the app, where people search for vendors and get a quote. In that way we were creating a real engagement from the user once they have made the decision about their next sustainable product. 

We knew that having those flows well structured and linked, the materialisation of the idea was going to be easier. For that reason we took time to analyse the possible solutions to make sure that we were going to use a smooth and simple user flow with our idea.

The prototype was created in mid fidelity and before testing it, we analysed it and tested it internally. Once we were happy with the result, we went to test it with 5 different users.

The Testing Process “First Round”

For the usability test we chose 5 homeowners who use their banks apps regularly and have either taken out a loan of $5000 or more in the past 5 years, or are looking to apply for one in the next 3 years. We decided to collect people with this type of description because they could be similar to the current Brigthe’s customers. They are also people who are willing to apply again for home’s improvements loans and they are familiar with apps that are providing financial services. We considered this last requirement was needed because it could facilitate them the understanding of the task and how to navigate through the process from an app that they haven’t used before.

Scenario

“You have an existing loan with Brighte and you are thinking of getting a battery but you need to know more about other people’s experiences that could help you to make the right decision”.

Tasks

 The Results

Next Steps

After analysing the insights collected from the usability test and with the purpose to make the changes needed to improve the prototype, we suggested the following steps:

- Conduct a usability test with current Brighte customers who use and are familiar with the app to confirm findings. Their familiarity with the app would also produce other insights.

With the “For You” section we suggest two possible solutions:

- Conduct a content testing workshop with Brighte customers to understand what they would rename the ‘For You’ section to.

- Another option for the “For You” section is to create a continual onboarding experience for users to help them understand its functionality and contents. This recommendation could apply to any other new section that would be incorporated within the app.

- Apply visual treatment to make the ‘Get Quote’ button more visible (e.g. increase button size, make it more opaque).

Other Steps To Take Into Consideration

As I mentioned previously, the current Brighte app is under complete analysis and renovation. There are quite a lot of things to improve and develop within the app.

During our research process we had some interviews with stakeholders and also we had some comparative analysis with other financial apps. The information gathered during this part of the research was the one that helped us to confirm the current condition of Brighte app and before implementing our ideas, the company needs to make some improvements: 

- Make the login process easier for users.

- Facilitate adjustments in the account details like updating bank details, personal details and  visualisation of the account.

- Provide solutions for payment arrangements and other kinds of customisations of the different plans offered by the company.

- Improve the visibility of the information used frequently by the user like statements, transactions, missed payment, issues with payments, amount paid and owed, just to mention some. 

Once those features and services have been improved, Brighte will be able to move into other more complex but personalised features like the one presented by us. During our ideation we came up with other ideas that could be perfectly developed and tested to complement what we have created in order to provide to “The Money Savvy Homeowner'' all the support, guidance and closeness to Brighte needed for their future loans. Some of the are:

Sustainable Home

Create a path for current and new customers that could be used as a guide to understand what is the next step in the process to have a sustainable home. This will help to reinforce the support needed from Brighte to help “The Money Savvy Homeowner” to have a clearer idea of what they have done and what is next.

Calculator

This could be a tool that not only will support the previous ideas, it is also a tool that could help the user to have more accurate data according to their needs and expectations as they will be calculating everything with their own data. This is a tool that can be used for the loan, but also could be implemented to be used with the current sustainable product(s) installed in the user’s house. This last point was a very repetitive insight during the research process, where we could find that those users who were able to have a calculator from the device, were the ones who were more likely to keep moving into the next step. They were able to constantly see the savings and benefits from the sustainable product.

Vendor Relationship

Keep improving the relationship with the vendors to provide “The Money Savvy Homeowner” a place where they will feel that both parts of the process (products and loan) are coming from the same place.

Lessons

Despite the fact that we tend to use the same structure most of the time, every single project is completely different to the previous ones and the way to face them. Also the challenges are different. This project brought to us as a team some meaningful lessons:

- When briefs are formulated with very specific things to do, they can become tasks. And when you are asked for tasks, the possibility of exploration can be limited. When we received the brief for this project, the client was asking for very specific things to do. Initially we saw it as a very “direct brief” that could make the whole process easier. But instead, we were “trapped” in a “list of tasks” to complete, which was creating constraints in our processes.
Was only when we had the first big challenge (the lack of Brighte Customers for our research) that we realised how important it is to have a brief that challenges you and gives you a background of the problem without giving you the direction of the possible solution. 

- During the research process for a project that was specifically focused on the current customer from the company, we didn’t have that customer. We thought we were not going to be able to gather the information needed. Fortunately, we had the support of some professionals and they suggested to us to take the risk and change the direction. A direction that we never thought was possible. Fortunately, we ended up gathering the right information and increased the scope for the users (from that moment we included new customers) and we were able to create the archetype that helped us to complete our project.
We learned that there are different types of challenges to overcome during every single project and we need to learn how to effectively find solutions to these problems. This is a talent that will grow and improve with the experience.

- Research is a very challenging part of the process and sometimes we don’t know if we are doing it correctly. That’s why it is so important to work as a team to keep ourselves on the right track and don’t let the noise caused by doubts stop our process. Once the different parts of the research started to complement one to each other, is when we realised how important it was to let the process talk by itself. The clarity in the research process comes at the end with all the information collected, analysed and projected. 

- We don’t need to agree all the time and when it happens, we need to let the other show you the reason behind their thoughts and decisions. If their reasons are not enough for you to be convinced, go back to research and try to find the reasons to provide the answers and solutions needed to keep moving in the process. The lack of agreement can cause not only delays in the process, it can also cause damage in the dynamic of the teams.

- There is not a bad or small idea during the ideation process. Having previous experiences during the ideation process where most of the ideas were discarded from the beginning without giving them the chance to evolve. I decided to run this process in a way that all the ideas were going to be used as much as we could through the different steps of the design process. In that way we were going to be able to keep mixing and improving them. As a result, some of the ideas that we had for the MVP were those initial ideas that were not very strong in the beginning but had the chance to become meaningful for our project.