Purpose: Feature release content for Simple, an online banking startup based in Portland, Oregon.
My role: Content Marketing Specialist (Ghost Writing, Editing)

How Beta Helps Us Build a Better Product

We recently announced Simple Shared and, along with it, invited our customers to become beta testers for the product. Since then, many of you have been curious about the beta process, so we’ve enlisted Product Manager (and generally awesome guy) Derek Zumsteg to answer your burning questions.

A month ago, we announced Simple’s Shared beta, available to our customers whose accounts are currently backed by our new partner bank, BBVA Compass. This is our first new product since the launch of Simple back in 2011, and we’re as excited as could be (and yes, it is possible to get excited about banking, if you’re into that kind of thing, like we are).

Since we announced Shared, we’ve fielded a lot of questions from curious customers who are wondering what the process is, and what they should expect. Today, I’m excited to share a look at that approach.

What is a beta?

A beta release takes something a company’s tested internally and puts it in the hands of ever-larger numbers of customers, like you. A beta release is a good thing for both our customers and Simple—customers get early access to the product and its benefits and have the opportunity to provide feedback, which in turn helps us build what our customers want. Beta testers are also able to show off those strikingly good-looking Shared cards before they go mainstream.

There were two big reasons to open Shared up in beta:

1: Banking can be complicated

As much as we test internally, our real-world relationships with people and money are so much more complicated and interesting. In trying to build something to help people be more confident in all kinds of financial relationships, we’re setting out into new territory.

2: Feedback is crucial

We’ve made hundreds of choices—large and small—in designing and building Shared. We wanted to create something special, and are already hearing how happy our employees are with the product. As much as I love my co-workers, we’re steeped in what we do every day. In order to get reliable feedback, we need to look to people outside of the company who are seeing our work and using the product for the first time.

Why is Shared different?

When we first discussed building Shared, our main goal was to give partners the same confidence with their money that we’ve given individuals. And just as we’ve never been satisfied with just copying what traditional banks have done, we set out to understand how people share their money. We started to talk to people about their problems and what they wanted to achieve, and immersed ourselves in the literature. We had to understand everything about how traditional accounts operate.

In our research, we found people didn’t understand their rights with a traditional joint bank account. They wondered, could they close the account, or remove the other person? Could their partner empty the account? What would happen if one of them died? We learned early on that to help two people begin to share money confidently, we’d need to use normal-human language to explain what will happen and how things work, not legalese. Meanwhile, we wanted to make creating a Shared account as easy as starting up an individual account. Choosing to open a Shared account is a big step for any two people, and we want to reduce, not create, stress.

Based on everything we learned in research, we built the first iteration of Shared, and began the alpha phase of testing with our employees. Through this process, we heard how the product worked, took feedback, fixed bugs, and also listened to their stories. We found that Shared helps people bond with their partners. We’re seeing that our partner stopped for groceries, which helps us feel grateful for them (and relief for ourselves) that shopping is taken care of. Or our partner texts us to put down the laptop and go eat, because they haven’t seen a lunch-buying notification. Hearing stories that what we’ve built is fostering better communication and conversations about their finances warms my icy-cold heart.

How does beta help Simple build?

Now that Shared is in beta, we’re asking our customers (specifically, those whose accounts are backed by BBVA Compass, our new partner bank) to try it, and give us feedback on what works (or needs work). Here’s how we’ll be acting on the feedback you give us. Let’s say that our beta testing customers are confused by Shared Goals. They’ll forward their concerns on to our Customer Relations staff who will be listening to feedback and passing that onto our team. The Shared team will then step back, re-examine why we decided to build Shared Goals that way, and come up with some additional approaches that our crack User Research team will then show to customers to see what works best for them. At the same time, we’ll be watching behind the scenes to ensure everything stays fast and reliable as more people come on, and as we add features for our beta customers. And, it goes without saying that we’re interested in your experiences, and would love to hear your Shared story as you begin to use the product.

As we continue to build Shared, security is our main priority; we know we must be careful with your money. Our product isn’t just another game or organizational app, it’s the service you bank with, and we work hard to protect you. We’ve exercised that same caution when rolling out and improving new features over the years—like Goals or Block Card— you can trust we’ll bring the same intentional roll-out to a full-blown new product. Shared is a whole different beast. It’s taken us a lot of patience and time, and to begin to launch something of this magnitude, designed for multiple people rather than individuals, we’ve had to make sure our back-end technology was ready for it, and now we’re making sure it’s ready for you.

How Our Customers Help Us Build a More Human Product

To build products like Shared Accounts, Simple needs to understand how our customers manage their money, and who they share it with. Senior Director of User Research Kelly Valade is here to explain what we’re learning about finances and relationships, and how our customers are helping us grow.Simple was founded on the idea that people should feel more confident about their money. To achieve this mission, we’ve always sought to understand people—what they know about their finances, what they’d like to know, and what products they need to feel confident about their money. In the early days, understanding our customers was easy. Why? Because we didn’t have as many.

For the first few years, we made decisions about our product in a few different ways. We tried to improve on our own personal banking experiences, drew from conversations our agents had with our customers, and made assumptions about what problems our customers were trying to solve for when they requested a particular feature. We trusted our gut when we had to decide what was right for our customers… but we were building the product for ourselves. We assumed that our customers were just like us, because our employees are customers of Simple. But the truth is, because we build Simple, we’ve never experienced our product in the same way as everyday customers.

As we’ve grown over the years, so has our need to understand our growing number of customers. At the beginning of this year, I joined Simple to build out a user research team whose sole purpose was to understand the needs of our customers.

The craft of research

The user research team at Simple is an incredible group of empathetic humans who are compelled to truly understand problems our customers experience and translating the cause of these problems (not just the symptom) to Product and Engineering teams. Good research is based on identifying problems, and communicating them to the people who need answers and can effect change.

User research teams aren’t a staple in all technology companies. Instead, it’s not uncommon to see product managers and designers conducting their own research. But the deep product knowledge developed by product managers, designers, and engineers often generates bias. Bias can be very subtle and woven into who is chosen to give feedback, the methodology used, the way questions are asked, or how a user test is conducted. Objectivity provided by researchers is critical in ensuring that product decisions enable us do right by our customers.

Our designers at Simple are incredible solution-makers. And they partner with Simple researchers for a true and deep understanding of the experiences customers have. Once our designers have the depth of information provided by user research, they are free to focus on their craft—creating the product that delights our customers and solves their financial problems.

How research informs product design

The user research team at Simple is a close partner with product and design throughout the entire development of a product. We test product concepts and help create a solid definition of the product we want to build.

As work begins to build that product, we continually research the concept to ensure it’s meeting the needs of our customers. Does it solve their problem? Is it clear? Is it easy to use? Is it delightful? Throughout this process, we often identify new problems to be solved for—before they impact our customers.

Our researchers also take an active role in beta programs—like the Shared Accounts beta currently underway—to connect with customers and gather their feedback as they move through various stages of the product. Understanding the impact our beta product has means we can prioritize bug fixes and ensure we meet the needs of our customers.

User research shifts us away from being reactive to issues and toward proactively preventing bad experiences for our customers. Shared is a prime example of how research touches every aspect of the product cycle—from early interviews to prioritizing bug fixes.

Talking through the sharing process

As part of the initial push to create Shared Accounts, the user research team sat down with couples to talk about their finances—one of the most personal and sensitive topics. Because finances in relationships can be such a taboo subject, I anticipated a lot of resistance in getting research participants to talk to me and open up. But I didn’t account for Simple’s secret user research weapon—our customers.

Simple customers rarely ever stand me up for a scheduled meeting, are never short of opinions, and are honest and open about their relationships, aspirations, fears, and even shame. They were happy to share intimate stories about how their finances have impacted their lives, positively and negatively, which was an incredibly heartening experience for the user research team.

After many user research studies, we were able to come away with a few key themes:

1. One size does not fit all

Sharing money is incredibly complex, and these days, people share money in all kinds of situations that span beyond what joint accounts have traditionally serviced: married couples. Unmarried couples share money to pay for everyday expenses, or save for shared aspirations, but aren’t eligible for traditional joint accounts. Meanwhile, what about parents who need to share money with their children? Or roommates who need to share money to pay shared expenses? Findings from our research show how much of a need there is for accounts that look past what traditional joint accounts offer, and how desperately our customers desire something new.

2. Visibility and privacy needs differ

Unsurprisingly, the balancing act of what should be public and what should remain private varies greatly across these different types of people and relationships. Parents want to see transactions, balances, and Goals in their child’s account, but don’t always want their children to see theirs, while roommates don’t want to expose their personal finance details with one another at all. As for romantic relationships, we were delighted to discover that while the visibility and privacy preferences varied from couple to couple, they were pretty consistent within the relationships themselves.

For example, in a private conversation with one partner, I heard them say they would rather keep some of their transactions private. When I asked the other partner about their needs, they echoed that same preference. Listening to two people have such consistency and mutual respect was incredibly sweet.

3. Learning (and re-learning) trust is hard

One couple we spoke to told me about baggage they had each brought into their marriage from previous marriages. Both had been financially burned by their exes, and they were working hard on building trust with each other so they could share money again. They were open about their shortcomings and successes—one partner admitted to being terrible with finances, having never learned from his parents, while the other was proud to tell us about using Simple’s Goals to create an emergency fund for the first time. They both discussed how they hoped Simple would help them get into a better financial state, and learn to trust one another enough to share their finances. Don’t you just love love?

4. Terminology is important

Our research also reemphasized the importance of the words we use. It’s not easy to describe the structure of our Shared Accounts in a clear and concise manner—each Shared account has two partners, three accounts, and four cards—so being deliberate was key. Outside of these descriptors, we also learned that by using non-heteronormative language, we were able to effectively convey that our Shared Accounts are different to traditional joint accounts. Inclusive language is hugely important to people outside of traditional husband-and-wife relationships, and we learned in our interviews that words like “partner” make many people feel included for the first time in the banking world.

We’re building Shared together

Sitting down with our customers helps Simple as a company learn more about our customers’ experiences well beyond simplistic bug reports. Having real conversations with people helps us as a company empathize with our customers better, while inspiring us to build products that will help them solve problems in their daily lives.

I suspect our customers’ willingness to open up to us is because they know Simple is comprised of real people who share their feelings about finances, and finding ways to share money in a way that makes sense for modern relationships. It’s great to know that our customers feel truly invested in our mission to help people feel more confident about their money, and we’re proud that they have faith in us. Faith is a huge honor, but it’s also a responsibility—one that spurs us on to build something that can solve problems, while motivating us to always do better by you.