Brazen conducted Borrowell’s first-ever user research, and the results are having a lasting impact on product strategy.

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The Challenge

Borrowell’s singular goal is “to help people make great decisions about credit”. This fast-growing Canadian company provides credit scores, product recommendations, and coaching to over a million users.

Though they had some quantitative data about their users from demographics and analytics, Borrowell lacked the deeper, more qualitative piece. What are Borrowell users’ habits, emotions, motivations, and goals related to their credit and to their finances in general? How could Borrowell use this information to create products that solve real user problems?

Borrowell challenged Brazen to answer this question, with the intention of using the results of the research to inform future product, marketing, and design decisions.

The Approach

We worked with Borrowell to select two high-priority user groups for this research based on their existing data. Within each of these groups, we recruited participants to represent a diverse range of financial situations and demographics.

In a series of in-depth interviews, we dug deep into participants' financial knowledge, habits, motivations, hopes, and fears. Though we conducted these interviews remotely in order get perspectives from all across Canada, the video-call setup we used helped us quickly form a rapport with the participants so that they felt comfortable sharing this sensitive, often emotional, information.

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“The management team is really thankful for all the insights, and really excited about using what you've found to set our long term strategy!”

Manager, Product Innovation

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The Impact

Being able to move beyond the numbers and tie real, human experiences and stories about financial struggles and successes to their user groups helped Borrowell build user empathy across the company and understand how to create products that will solve real user problems.

Borrowell was so excited by what they learned from this first foray into user research, they immediately extended the project to include 3 additional user groups. The grand finale was a presentation of user insights and recommendations by Brazen at a company-wide meeting.