Morgan Stanley's Spending & Budgeting tool was being abandoned. What started as general inactivity turned into removing the service completely from their toolbox. Most complained the dashboard was "empty and boring" and that their transactions were perpetually miscategorized. We needed to transform a third-party solution into something our clients would actually use.
Summary
After auditing the experience, we discovered users had plenty of control on paper but zero direction. The UI was cluttered with irrelevant functions and the category system was so convoluted that users couldn't distinguish what they could actually manipulate.
To solve all of these problems, we built a guided onboarding flow to ensure users set up their accounts correctly, redefined what a category really is, and reimagined how rules are executed. After 9 months of iterating, we achieved a 30% increase in monthly adoption, 25% increase in monthly active users, and tripled the percentage of users creating budgets after enrollment.
Conclusion
Sometimes, the smallest details lead to the biggest impact. Among all our redesigns our most significant win came from adding a dismissable banners after users were onboarded. Just a few strategic prompts after setup tripled our budget creation rate. It's a reminder that in design, the tiniest friction points often create the largest barriers. Fix those, and everything else falls into place.
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