Soldo

Soldo is an expense management platform designed to help businesses simplify their spending. Companies create Soldo cards with prepaid balances and spending limits, then assign them to their employees, projects and teams. This lets them manage budgets, spending and reconciliation with ease.

Project scope

As climate change becomes a more urgent issue, companies are recognising the need to reduce their CO2e emissions. Proposed changes to current climate policies are also on the cards, which would require companies to be tracking and reporting on all emissions by law by the end of 2030. One key area of focus for companies looking to track emissions will be business expenses, like those which are managed within Soldo.

In response to these challenges, we saw a business need to build a solution that would allow users to easily track, analyse and report on emissions made as a result of business spending.

Benefits for the user

Better awareness of emissions created as a result of business and employee expenses
Better awareness of changes that could save money, as well as reduce emissions, providing a financial incentive
For companies already reporting on emissions, time saved by replacing a manual and complex process with a much simpler, faster and more efficient one
Opportunity to offset emissions by contributing to climate projects, generating a positive impact on company branding
Clear guidance on what is happening in the market, as well as any regulation changes

Benefits for Soldo

Being one of the first in the expense-management market to offer this feature
To help bring focus to an increasingly urgent issue, and show that we care

Research and prototype testing

Initial research

Before we began thinking about the design, our UX Research team conducted interviews and surveys to gather data. They conducted qualitative interviews with 6 finance professionals who had at least some visibility over sustainability initiatives, and who worked at companies with at least 100 employees. They also conducted a survey with 159 finance, administration and HR professionals, from companies with at least 50 employees.

The objectives of this research were:

To understand how involved companies were in sustainability initiatives
To gather information on initiatives already in place, if any
To understand how (and whether) sustainability metrics were being tracked, and by who

The key findings were:

Interest in sustainability has largely been triggered by Covid, especially when it comes to reducing emissions by travelling less
Most companies think of sustainability as a cost-cutting activity, finding areas where they can save money while also respecting any climate regulations
Finance, HR and admin teams know little about sustainability initiatives, and are rarely involved beyond cost-cutting
It’s rare for companies to track emissions when it comes to employee expenses
There is a general lack of knowledge around the topic of reducing CO2e emissions and changing regulations

Naming

In addition, the Research team also conducted a short survey with 160 finance professionals to gather insights on potential feature names. These included names I put forward like ‘CO2e emissions Tracker’ and names put forward by the Marketing team, like ‘Soldo EcoTrack’ and ‘Soldo Impact’.

Participants were presented with 8 names in total, as well as the option to opt for something else.

The results were clear, with the majority of participants (over a third of the sample), preferring the clear and easy-to-understand ‘CO2e emissions tracker’.

Once we had the results, I collaborated with the Marketing team to finalise the name. Due to the positive marketing potential of this feature, they were keen to include the word ‘Soldo’ in it. As a UX writer, I felt this was the wrong approach for two reasons:

None of our other features have the word ‘Soldo’ before them. Going with this approach would introduce a big inconsistency into the product
This feature would appear within the Soldo platform itself, so users didn’t need to be told who the feature was from. Adding ‘Soldo’ would clutter the navigation menu and introduce unnecessary cognitive load for the user

We agreed to keep ‘CO2e emissions tracker’ within the product, and use ‘Soldo CO2e emissions tracker’ for any external marketing material. This would ensure the best user experience inside the product, but also help ensure a positive impact on Soldo as a brand.

Prototype

Once the data had been collected and analysed, the UX designer and I used it to build the first basic prototype for testing. Here are some of the things we considered:

To combat the lack of user knowledge on the topic of emissions tracking, I included a general overview, as well as information on current and future regulations, with options to read more on the Soldo knowledge base
As cost-cutting was mentioned a lot as being a driver for change for most companies, I highlighted links between reducing emissions and saving money to try and encourage more engagement
We also introduced a series of questions on company size, industry etc, so users could see the average emissions for a company similar to theirs, and measure themselves against it
We played with the idea of having a scoring system, where companies could set a goal and receive feedback on how they were doing in terms of reducing CO2e emissions

The prototype was tested with finance professionals from companies with over 100 employees. Despite receiving praise for the design and clarity of the terminology and content, the appetite for the level of detail included in the prototype was still fairly low. Participants also felt they would struggle to accurately input the data required in order to find the average CO2e usage for companies of a similar size, so were unsure of how useful this functionality would be.

The design

Despite the prototype receiving generally positive reviews, when we looked at the research and data as a whole, it became clear that most users were just looking for a basic functionality at this stage. Most of the participants surveyed and spoken to did have some level of interest in reducing emissions, but only if it was linked to cost-cutting, or was something they could do easily and quickly. The appetite for a standalone sustainability feature with complex functionality did not seem to be there.

As a result, we changed our plan and scaled back the design. We talked about future iterations, but agreed to focus on the basic functionality for the first release.

We decided to:

Scale back the design to offer only basic emissions-tracking and CO2e-offsetting functionality
View the feature as more of a ‘tool’, which we would place inside our existing integrations section, rather than adding it as a new section to the main navigation menu
Provide enough content to give the user the context they needed to care about and use the tracker, but remove any copy that was seen as being too detailed

Despite our scaled-back approach, I knew that the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ were still three of the most important parts of this feature. What was the problem? What were the regulations? What did the user need to do? How could Soldo help? Why should the user care?

To tackle these, I created two modals to sit between the ‘Connect’ button and landing page for the feature itself. Technical restrictions within this section meant that for this first release, I could only use the basic modal component with set design and structure, and couldn’t create anything new.

To try and combat this, I broke the content up into smaller chunks, and used sub-headers and bolding to draw the eye and make the copy more scannable. I started with an overview, then went into the detail, so users could follow along more easily.

Impact on the user/business

Impact on the end user:

A simple, clear and easy-to-use flow, containing only the key elements
A head start on emissions-tracking ahead of potential legislation changes, and a way of staying up to date that doesn’t involve lots of manual work and research
Added benefit from a brand marketing perspective, with businesses buying carbon credits and sharing their impact with their customers
For any users already tracking emissions, a much easier, simpler and more efficient experience than tracking manually

Impact on the business:

Soldo stands out for being one of the first to offer this built-in functionality, giving us an edge over our competitors and allowing us to attract new users who care about sustainability
Added benefit from a marketing perspective, as a way of showing Soldo cares about sustainability and is trying to help make a difference
Plays into Soldo’s main USP of taking complex, manual processes and turning them into simple, intuitive and efficient user experiences

In summary

Working on this project really highlighted the importance of having good data and being agile and adaptable. By knowing what our users wanted, we were able to be reactive, changing our approach to save time, cost and effort on our end, and to produce a better, more simplified and ultimately more user friendly experience, while still meeting business needs.

Case study: CO2e tracker