Rethinking the debt management experience
Vanguard, June 2025 – October 2025
Activities
Design thinking, Workshops, Journey Map, User flows, User Research, UX, UI
Contributions
I led our UX team (Researcher, Designer, Content Strategist, and Writer) over 6 months to design an enhanced debt pay down strategy tool. This allows the ability for participants to explore better ways to pay off their debt.
What is the debt pay down tool and what’s the issue?
Vanguard’s financial wellness offer elicits access to a debt pay down tool to participants that allows them to:
Connect existing debts through a third-party aggregator
See how extra contributions can save them money and time
Select a strategy (snowball or avalanche)
Save their strategy and implement their debt pay down plan
Although, the issue is the tool has seen very low usage and completion rates since its infancy in 2023.
User research → Insights
I partnered with our UX researcher to run current state usability tests with users. I created multiple current state prototypes to mimic the different flows, and helped create a discussion guide with key questions that would draw our where our tool was missing the mark.
User goal #1: Understand the purpose and benefits of the tool
Without a clear understanding of what the tool actually offers to participants, they were hesitant to move past step 1.
"
What's the need to connect it? If I have an account with Chase, how is it relevant to Vanguard? How does that help me? If there is a reason, [the reason] needs to be more explicit for me to be comfortable.
"
What does this tool do?
In order to highlight what the tool could do for them, I took myself to the DPY (debt pay down tool) API consumer guide to understand the key benefits the tool offers.
So I took the benefits our methodology team has pinpointed for us and turned it into a simple, to-the-point, and digestible format for our participants to consume, prompting them to continue on past step 1 of the tool.
User goal #2: An easier modeling experience
The second pain participants were experiencing was a modeling experience that was fragmented. They had to enter extra contributions they could apply to their debts on one screen, then move onto the next screen to see the results of it, with no indication of how those extra contributions were applied or affected the different strategies.
Additionally, once a participant was on the second page, they had to toggle between two strategy views and mentally compare the differences between them. This caused a high cognitive load on them and left them frustrated and confused on how to move forward confidently.
"
I don't want to toggle between strategies and remember the numbers in my head. Show me the numbers next to one another.
So knowing that we needed to:
Have all modeling functions on one page
Display all strategy data in one view
Make it easy to understand differences in strategies and how extra money was being applied
I organized and ran a sketching workshop with our UX team to gather a diverse range of ideas to solve for this.
After discussing and voting on the top ideas, I mocked up what a reimagined modeling experience could be. We then took two different concepts through research to understand if this was hitting the mark for our participants.
"Columns" Modeling
"
I love this. My husband and I are, by hand and using ChatGPT, come up with a debt pay down plan and timeline. And we don't have a tool like this where we could say, well if we skipped this and put this extra towards, what would that look like? So I think this is a great tool.
Recommendations for improvements
1
Direct participants to the input fields to model how different payments affect debt strategies
2
Use the column format for ease of comparing strategies
3
Improve usability by adding hints for strategy names and making clear that “minimum” is the basis for comparison
User goal #3: A results page that resonates and explains
Once a user has chosen a strategy to move forward with, they are presented a results page with that saved data. In the current state, they felt that the results page was redundant to the strategy selection page, serving no real purpose. They were also left to their own vices to search for the key differences, benefits, and changes needed in their debt strategies.
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Step 4 appears redundant to Step 3. I'm not sure the point of this page.
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I want to know exactly what to do. Given that I have to make the changes myself, here is the current monthly payment and the new monthly payment.
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I'm unclear on how my extra payments are distributed among my debts.
What users needed on the results page was how they can implement their new debt pay down strategy, which needed to include:
The details of their strategy (think confirmation details)
How they were going to apply their new strategy to their debts
Next steps they could take
A way to track progress
I started with the details of their strategy as this would be the first element on their page and serve as a reminder to them what they were implementing. After I put together a number of different iterations, our team landed on a similar presentation to the previous step, but in a horizontal layout.
After we had the debt details figured out, we needed to find a way to communicate how to help a participant actually apply their strategy in real life. The API that powers our tool provides a PDF of a detailed payment plan that covers the lifespan of the debt payoff.
We iterated on ideas on how to include this detailed payment plan in a participant’s results, but quickly realized that this was way too much information for a user to sort through, and may confuse them more than help them.
What participants needed was what do I need to do right now. By giving the participant a snapshot in time of what they needed to change right now, we significantly simplified the payment plan.
Now put those two components together with a simple next steps checklist to guide a user with the actions they can take and we had ourselves a reimagined results page for our debt tool.
Conclusion
While the enhancements to the debt tool are still in early development, initial usability testing has shown promising results, with notable improvements in user satisfaction and increased intent to use the tool. These early indicators suggest that the redesign is on the right track in addressing user needs. As development progresses, the team plans to further validate and refine these improvements through experimentation, including A/B testing of the step 1 screen. These efforts aim to ensure that the final experience is both user-friendly and impactful.