Harnessing Emotion to Reach People with Debt

When people see their total debt, they don’t just see a number. People in debt reported feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and even fearful about the amount of money they had to pay off. Pillar was initially positioned as the app to get you out of debt faster. But what we learned in our research was that faster didn’t seem possible—they already felt too discouraged by their minimal progress.

“I feel like my life is on pause.”

— Ashley, age 25

What’s better than faster?

Control.

We needed to meet users where they were emotionally. We heard from student debt holders that they didn’t feel in control.

Taking a page from Queen, we repositioned Pillar as the way to break free from student debt.

Results

In landing page tests, we saw higher conversion with messaging about taking control of your debt compared to paying your debt off faster.
When soliciting user feedback, engagement was higher with emotionally charged headlines like “Student loans suck” than monetary incentives, such as “Share your feedback, get $25.”

Additional case studies

How my team got internal buy-in to streamline onboarding

Learn more about how we broke down barriers between departments to do what’s best for the user >

The importance of talking to your users

Learn how research led to changes in the 6-month direction of Pillar, an app designed to help people tackle their student loans >

Getting more users to make first-time payments with smarter onboarding

Learn how we addressed drop-off spikes in the Pillar onboarding experience >

Winning trust through the Pillar payment interface

Explore the interface choices we made to gain our users’ trust >