CASE STUDY:
GAMIFYING
BILLS
M Y R O L E S
CONTENT DESIGNER
UX WRITER
DESK RESEARCHER
PM + TEAM RECRUITER
T O O L S
MIRO
NOTION
FIGMA
GOOGLE SLIDES
T E A M
USER TESTING - John White
UI DESIGNER - Nibras Ibnomer
BE DEV - Allan Wazacz
PLD - Pooran Panwar
T I M E
6 MONTHS
QUICK LINKS
ABOUT
CLEO
"STRESS LESS ABOUT MONEY"
Cleo isn't a traditional personal finance app.
She's an AI chatbot hellbent on redefining Gen Z's relationship with money. Her "big sis energy" tone of voice tells users like it is, but always with empathy — laughing only at what they have the power to change.
As a Saas platform, she enables users to:
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Track money
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Autosave
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Build a budget
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Realize money goals
Cleo's mission?
"To fight for the World's financial health"
PROJECT
BACKGROUND
LET THE GAMES BEGIN
Gamified learning is a proven means to guide users in successful everyday spending. Still, Cleo only offered two games, both focused solely on reviewing users' past spending. So rather than giving users tools for future success, the games reviewed spending missteps more than they prevented them.
My PLD asked me to deliver a "new bet" game experience for Cleo's chat function. The game theme and its content were left to my discretion. I wanted to focus on planning — the key to preventing overspending. Considering the success of our current games with high-intent, low-motivation users (our majority base), we had the opportunity to create a game that could motivate users to plan spending around fixed payments, like bills and subscriptions, in a way that's less work and more fun.
OBJECTIVE
Build on the success of previous games to cement Cleo's value proposition in guiding users with their everyday spending through forward planning, but make it easy, fun, and offer hope.
TARGET AUDIENCE
Any bank-connected user with income and bills in their budget
REQUIREMENTS
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6 mo timeline
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Brand voice, style guide adherence
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High focus on past game success to minimize coding and design scope
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Use user budget data
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Restrict to chat platform
ANTI-GOALS
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Users' past transactions
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Only optimize existing game(s)
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Prize money as USP
TIMELINES
Research: 1 month
Define content: 1 month
Prototype: 2 weeks
User testing: 1 week
Code: 3 weeks
A/B test: 8 weeks
Promote (if successful)
SUCCESS METRICS
Leading: Adoption equal to or greater than the existing game
Lagging: Retention equal to or greater than the existing game for 8 weeks
HYPOTHESIS
By making awareness of upcoming bills and paycheck timing as easy as playing a game, we can motivate users to plan their everyday spending in advance and spend more wisely.
The new game had to succeed as a chat-based experience. I knew from my performance background that anchoring conversation in a relatable context is integral to meaningful audience engagement. I had to meet users where they were—the game had to address a need.
Research was the most important step in delivering structured and useful game content. Addressing pain points and challenges, and fitting users' mental models around planning spending and fixed payments had to serve as the basis of the game.
To validate my assumption that bills posed a substantial challenge around planning everyday spending, I looked to Cleo's existing bank of valuable user research.
RESEARCH
KNOWN USER
NEEDS
SUPER-NEED: IDK MY BILLS
GOAL
Use existing research to validate my assumption of the need for a forward-planning game and identify a super-need or game theme specific to fixed payments and bills.
FINDINGS
Users don't know which bills are coming out of which paycheck. Bills have a monthly cadence and pay is generally weekly or biweekly, adding cognitive load, resulting in missed payments, late payments, and overdrawing.
✅ Yes there's a need for users to plan spending better around their bills
🚫 No there's not an explicit desire stated by users for a game that helps them do this
🤨 Maybe there's an opportunity to gamify understanding which bills come from which paycheck
How might this new game address the need to plan better around bills to help prevent users from overspending? The "how" is addressed within the chat game question-and-answer combos—we'll call these sub-needs. This was the structure of Cleo's current, high-retention Cleo chat-based quiz game "Know Your Money." If the theme and super-need of that game is "to know where my money went" then each of the question-and-answers combos supports this via a sub-need.
Next step? Examine the sub-needs in the existing game's content.
EXISTING GAME
ANALYSIS
SUB-NEEDS AS CHAT Q&A'S
GOAL
Uncover the chat format and needs-logic of Cleo's most engaged game, "Know Your Money" to define user sub-needs it addresses.
FINDINGS + SYNTHESIS
To understand this, I created a script version of the existing game and mined for sub-needs like actors mine for scripted subtext (ok, theatre degree!).
The script below is a sample of the work to identify the sub-needs addressed by the existing game enabling users to better "know their money" and spending.
To define Q&A sub-needs of a new bill game and provide ample value to users, I looked at the current market's most popular bill-tracking mobile apps. Working backward from the solutions these features provide, I saw the style of bill guidance users valued, as well as the context and frequency of those feature interactions.
MARKET
RESEARCH
BILL SUB-NEEDS: DEFINED
GOAL
Identify user sub-needs around bills addressed by popular personal finance products by working backward from the solutions offered to inform the content and value of the bills quiz game Q&As.
FINDINGS + SYNTHESIS (EXAMPLES)
DEFINING
CONTENT
COLLABORATION:
BILLS, BUT
MAKE IT FUN
Now there was only one problem...
Bills aren't fun.
Why play a game about your bills? Existing Cleo games offered cash prizes, but it looked like there wasn't a budget this time.
UX Writing team to the rescue 🚑
I held a workshop (see it here) to collab on framing users' bill savvy in the context of something fun, funny, and on-brand for Cleo. We're a very democratic bunch, and without going into too much detail, we collectively shied away from "bill commiseration" as it's inherently negative, opting for a more "fuck bills; time for revenge" cathartic vibe. Through a series of votes and ideations landed on the theme:
Play this game, and if you get all the questions about your bills correct, Cleo will put all your bills in a rocket and shoot them into f*cking space (hopefully Bezos pays 'em next time he's up there).
CONVERSATION
DESIGN
USER NEEDS AS NARRATIVE
I needed to prioritize bill sub-needs based on the impact toward reaching the user goal to plan spending. Because of the chat-based aspect, I also had to make sure they created a narrative arc that felt conversational.
I prioritized the needs and examined how they fit together as a "story" from the users' POV.
Click to magnify 🔎 👇
USER
CONDITIONS
ONE-SIZE FITS NO ONE
Consideration for user "conditions"—the timing of users' bills to fit within the context of the questions. To show someone info about their upcoming bills within a specific time period... they have to have bills due.
I charted the required user data conditions against the most beneficial sub-needs. Considering the variation between pay (generally weekly or biweekly) and users' fixed payments, I wanted to cast the widest net possible to create a viable user pool.
This showed me what users I could serve specific bill data to, helping me rule out what bill content wouldn't serve enough users to justify adding to the game—below is a sample of that thinking.
To understand how this fit as a succession of Q&As, I created a hypothetical flow translating sub-needs into quiz questions, taking into account that a question might skip over a user without the appropriate data, to learn if varied bill data would leave users with minimum 4 quiz questions (to emulate the length of the existing successful game).
TIMING IS
EVERYTHING
The condition work proved that serving the game at a two-week cadence not only aligned with the need to see what bills came out of which paycheck but also gave time for enough bills to accrue so that the same 4 bill data points could be served to all game users. To avoid competing with another payday chat feature, I worked with our glorious Back End Dev to decide that the new game should be served every even Saturday, as the majority of US workers are paid on even weeks. This also created a tidy test against the existing game (which ran on a Saturday) so our lead and lag results had a clean control.
You'll be relieved to know at this point I started writing the game chat content
WRITING A
CHAT GAME
WHAT WOULD CLEO DO?
CONTENT CHALLENGES
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What's "winning" in this game?
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What's the incentive to play?
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Balancing tone and information
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How do we employ humor and keep info clear?
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WINNING AND INCENTIVE TO PLAY
Cleo's other games leveraged a cash prize as an incentive to play games about spending. This time, cash as the USP was off-limits. The incentive to play had to live in the delight of playing, and "seeing bills get blasted to space" as a reward for knowing details about them. There had to be a desire to win.
As a result, I needed the game content to:
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Leverage Cleo's humor to bring delight
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Be easy enough to feel winning was possible
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Be challenging enough that it didn't bore
BALANCING CLARITY, BRAND VOICE, AND FUN
A major challenge of UX writing at Cleo is maintaining clarity and straightforwardness with her beloved dry humor. Plus, the idea of "shooting the bills one can recall into space" isn't exactly familiar, so it was imperative to keep the bill information and fun theme clear.
Below are examples of improvements to game content after internal feedback showed that the humor sometimes overpowered clarity.
UX writing principals guided the changes with a high focus on clarity and leveraging tone of voice to improve clarity.
PROTOTYPE
HIGH-FIDELITY
PROTOTYPE
DESIGN N STITCHED BY NIBRAS - UXD
USER TESTING
RESULTS
ASSUMPTIONS: VALIDATED 👍
Overall, users saw the game as valuable, empathetic, useful, and a totally fun way to examine their bills. Aside from a few additions of bill details, the main takeaways were positive and validated moving forward with the hardcode build and in-app A/B testing against the existing game.
John White: Cleo UR
John White: Cleo UR
CONTENT SUMMARY
Key Learnings:
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The content and experience are seen as valuable and users would replay
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Some users were tentative about the concept of shooting bills into space
Improvements:
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A summary of all bills should be added to the end of the game
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Q1 Bill due dates and amounts should be included in the answer
Question 4
ORIGINAL
IMPROVED
IMPROVEMENT
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Adding dates and amounts to bills
A/B TESTING
+ PROMOTING
WE DID IT, JOE
After the 8-week A/B test against the user favorite "Know Your Money" game, the new "Know Your Bills" game was promoted to 100% of qualified users. Core engagement with the new game was equal to the original game, though the adoption and retention were not as good numerically because a user has to meet multiple conditions to receive the Bills game.
Today, the "Know Your Bills" game outperforms the original "Know Your Money" game in terms of engagement numbers.
OUTCOMES
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SLT was thrilled with the impact and value of the game
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A successful game that didn't rely a on cash prize USP
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Cleo's had it's third-ever game
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A fun and educational experience added to the remit of chat content that is currently used to support other chat-based features