Enabling Growth by Uplifting UX at Empower

Serving the underserved, by being an ethical source of strategy, while elevating ease of use for those with acute need. Driving business success by leveraging thoughtful UX, streamlining flows for a time-strapped user.

Highlights

Realigned team strategy mid-quarter when our OKR was determined at-risk, moving away from rapid experimentation toward a problem-first approach that emphasized cohesive experience design over incremental metric lifts.

Elevated Empower’s onboarding flow by guiding the team to prioritize usability and polish across the full journey—helping drive growth and unlock the next stage of product maturity.

Britney Scarbrough

Product Designer + Project lead

Andrew Kuo

Product Manager

Max Godfrey

iOS Engineer

Last 3 weeks of Q4 '24

Timeline

About Empower

Empower is a lending company whose mission is to deliver fair access to credit, for a population of users that are beaten down by America's current credit system. The primary product is Cash Advance. The lending space is a tough one, but working for a payday advance app?

67% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. It is a sad reality that many are not secure, and often come up short for even the most basic of needs. When you need gas in the car to pull in the next paycheck, or you have a child with a rumbly tummy, you will agree to most anything to do what you have to do. That makes this population incredibly vulnerable. Having grown up in a household like this, I am acutely aware of the need for services like ours.

Many demonize the industry as a whole—but where needs go unmet, a void will always be filled. My role at Empower is to fill that void with moral intent: to meet the needs of those at risk, with care and conviction.

IMPACT

This resulted in a half-baked experiences, with degrading quality. While incremental changes improved by fractional percents, this was not the impact our OKRs demanded. We needed a fundamental reset.

OBSERVATION

The success of rapid experimentation was beginning to stagnate. As incremental changes were quickly pushed out, little focus was spent on the end-to-end experience and finer details. Resourcing for larger initiatives or polish sprints did not exist.

LOW RISK, LOW REWARD

Empower is a highly ambitious org, that is driven by a very cautious culture. While our experiences got the job done, every quarter, we raise the bar. The push for ambitious growth began to feel in opposition to our low-risk appetite. When our low-lift experiments were no longer working, it became clear we needed to reexamine our approach.

Challenging the status quo

We stepped back, and regrouped. The end of the quarter was rapidly approaching, and we were not close to our end goal. When we looked back, there were so many experiments we had shipped over the past few quarters.

Every product suggestion under the sun (make it shorter, no pages should scroll, use less text) had seemingly been tried. It was obvious that our onboarding was not the picture of design excellence, so how were we going to move the needle?

there had to be a better way

I took a break from the constant ship-grind to reexamine everything. From a design POV, rather a product POV. A few key facts stood out to me, I began to build my case.

The flow had largely looked the same for the past ~2 years

Small experiments drove incremental success, but we were stuck in a localized maximum

The flow was shorter, but over time, quality was suffering – small bugs, creeping loading times, slight design inconsistencies...

When comparing to newer UX trends, it was becoming clear that we were falling behind

Increased focus on polish and quality

Modernized UX for PII input

Consistency in visual languge

General content reduction

A reimagined onboarding

I set out to try something new. Perhaps it was not any individual step that was impacting our bottom line. Perhaps it was the sum of its parts. I had been concepting a redesigned flow for the better part of a year. I decided it was time to turn these concepts into reality.

Inspired by modern UX patterns, anecdotal feedback from users and internal testers, factoring in data from prior experimentation, I created a prototype to make the case to try something new.

EXECUTION

Approved for a strike-team to execute, I paired with a single engineer to make this reality. It was a big bet, redesigning the whole of onboarding in one fell swoop. To set the precedent of design focused changes moving forward, this one had to be a success.

Outcomes

We completed this project over just 3 weeks, from ideation to launch. To meet the deadline, small cuts had to be made. Due to technical limitations, some steps like OTP could not be moved. I considered of all the changes, which were most likely to make impact?

I worked hand in hand with my engineer Max, together we ran a cost-analysis to scope above-the-line vs below. I iterated quickly on design while he simultaneously built out our front end. At the buzzer, we pulled a 180 on our OKR.

+0.9%

Lift to subscription activation

Our OKR for the quarter was to lift this metric by 1% – nearly our entire success for the quarter was driven by this single experiment.

+30k

Annualized new iOS users

Estimated user increase from a single experiment, annualized based on current subscription rates.

This impact was also only annualized based on one platform (iOS) – android was to build the flow shortly after.

+3.8%

PII submissions

Thanks to a redesigned info form UX, users were successfully submitting their PII at a much higher rate.

This translated into higher net-conversion thanks to an increased ability to message users for dropped-cart campaigns.

+1.7%

ATT Approval

This was essential in driving marketing efficiency, a second core metric for the Growth team. By moving ATT up in the flow, we saw a higher exposure and approval rates, while streamlining the flow downfunnel.

Key takeaways

This project went far beyond business impact. This became an internal case to validate the importance of quality in experiences, and the role of design within our org.

Summarized are key principles that I formed for our org to denote how we apply this success and retain these learnings in projects moving forward.

Thinking outside the box

Small experiments are essential for learning, but we shouldn’t stop there. These learnings should bolster our confidence when it comes to taking big bets.

It’s smart to tread carefully and do our due diligence to justify a larger / sweeping initiative. But sometimes, for the sake of innovation, we could benefit from taking a leap of faith.

Recognizing the impact of UX

The fact that something works does not enable us to ignore industry trends, nor turn a blind eye to the impacts of quality and craft. We run a risk of falling behind if we do not reexamine what we believe to be ‘tried and true’ thus ‘set in stone’.

Embodying owner mindset

We should not ignore our own intuition for the sake of speed or to avoid being the squeaky wheel. We should trust our personal experience and make it known when we have strong convictions.

Our product leaders are incredible, but our delivery teams are also best in class. There’s magic when we lean on our shared expertise. By taking chances on putting the power in their hands, we drive a culture of high-investment where this magic becomes repeatable.

In the following months, we applied these principles to future projects. Our success story continued–

Read ahead to learn more about the growth impacts of personalization and bespoke experiences for user cohorts + shipping ethical experiences that move business metrics.