Debt Management Plan Web Portal
GreenPath Financial Wellness
GreenPath is helping people escape debt and build a financial foundation for their dreams.
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Atomic started by observing and interviewing GreenPath's call center team. Together with GreenPath, they created a prototype for testing using a sketching exercise.
A mockup of the mobile view of the portal was shared directly with GreenPath clients (the end users) via the private GreenPath DMP Facebook community.
Atomic learned that starting the DMP can be stressful. Clients are often confused about what they need to do, and they’re hungry for practical information about their plan. Atomic also learned that clients really appreciate encouragement and motivation to continue.
During design, Atomic asked the Facebook group to review workflows, user interfaces, and visual designs. They then made a clickable prototype and tested it with DMP clients on-site.
Member of the DMP Facebook Community
Coordinating Stakeholders
Project Highlights
The portal emphasizes motivational messages and useful, encouraging stats. It shows each user their unique tasks and offers live chat support with GreenPath. Users also receive nudges, progress updates, just-in-time messaging, and milestone badges to keep them motivated.
The three main features on the dashboard were designed to answer the 3 most common questions surfaced during user research: When is my next payment due? What tasks do I need to complete? How long until my debts are paid?
The technology supporting their apartment residents was slow, outdated and fragmented; residents had to navigate multiple difficult to use apps for essential services like rent payments and maintenance requests.
Their new app would integrate multiple third-party apps into a single platform with native iOS and Android versions. It would let residents pay rent, request maintenance, RSVP to events, build community, connect with neighbors, and book amenities—all in one place. Neumann also had big ideas for future innovative app features, making a scalable app architecture essential for future expansion.
Ryder knew he needed a partner who could not only understand Flow’s vision for a single disruptive, community-centric living app, but also adeptly execute the technically demanding project on time. That’s when he knew he needed to be strategic about Flow’s next partnership to ensure it didn’t falter like the last ones.
Technical Specs
Atomic designed the system architecture and wrote software and firmware for:
Nicole Bladzik, Director of Information Technology
Phase 2: Developing a Full-feature Workshop Experience
With the Learning Map developed into a digital product, Root wanted to further help users dive into their organization’s strategy, financials, or processes with a second release. Among other features, they sought to create a kind of a virtual whiteboard, where everyone’s voice could be heard in a fun, engaging, and meaningful way.
Atomic’s Software Design Practice Lead in Ann Arbor, Bryan Elkus, led design work on the project. He saw the user experience of going through the Learning Map activities as a type of collaborative online challenge.
Under the guidance of Atomic's Software Consultant & Designer Bryan Elkus, the project emphasized collaborative user experiences, akin to an online group challenge, focusing on:
- Consultants facilitating onboarding, ice-breakers, and exercises.
- Client company employees engaging in organizational change.
Atomic Object Software Consultant & Developer Matt Soto his development work focused on delivering Root’s vision of polish, complex features, and emphasizing a business model around the digital product.
Root's VP, Nate Butki says Atomic’s consultative approach helped the project team uncover and address underlying needs rather than merely executing requests.
“Atomic didn’t want to just figure out what we wanted and give it to us—but rather figured out the need and helped us with it,” he said. “If they had listened to us and spit out exactly what we asked for, they would have only gotten 80 percent of it. Atomic’s team asked the questions and pushed us further.”
Technical Specs
Atomic designed the system architecture and wrote software and firmware for:
Nicole Bladzik, Director of Information Technology
Phase 2: Developing a Full-feature Workshop Experience
With the Learning Map developed into a digital product, Root wanted to further help users dive into their organization’s strategy, financials, or processes with a second release. Among other features, they sought to create a kind of a virtual whiteboard, where everyone’s voice could be heard in a fun, engaging, and meaningful way.
Atomic’s Software Design Practice Lead in Ann Arbor, Bryan Elkus, led design work on the project. He saw the user experience of going through the Learning Map activities as a type of collaborative online challenge.
Under the guidance of Atomic's Software Consultant & Designer Bryan Elkus, the project emphasized collaborative user experiences, akin to an online group challenge, focusing on:
• Consultants facilitating onboarding, ice-breakers, and exercises.
• Client company employees engaging in organizational change.
Atomic Object Software Consultant & Developer Matt Soto his development work focused on delivering Root’s vision of polish, complex features, and emphasizing a business model around the digital product. Root's VP, Nate Butki says Atomic’s consultative approach helped the project team uncover and address underlying needs rather than merely executing requests.
“Atomic didn’t want to just figure out what we wanted and give it to us—but rather figured out the need and helped us with it,” he said. “If they had listened to us and spit out exactly what we asked for, they would have only gotten 80 percent of it. Atomic’s team asked the questions and pushed us further.”
Nate Butki, Root VP
Taste-testing the Product in the Field
Delivering A Great Product and An Empowered Team
By getting to share their decades’ experience with agile practices, Atomic’s team got to watch the counterparts at Root develop new skills over the course of the second engagement.
Soto says he loved watching Root’s inherently collaborative culture adopt the agible practices they were learning.
“After a few months, they loved how easy and smooth it was to make last-minute changes, to pivot in another direction, and use feedback to spend their time where it was most impactful,” he said.
Root’s Jared Page says the agile approach to product design, development, and management he saw during the engagement had a profound impact.
“One of my favorite things about this project is that everyone got better—better at our jobs and better with communication; it just feels cool,” he said. “Sometimes you work for a year and don’t know if you’ve improved but everyone could look back on this project and say they’ve improved. This project changed the way I will work forever.”
Trust and Versatility Drive Rapid App Development
Flow developers had an ongoing worry that working with a consultancy would bring a sub-par codebase, and Flow leadership knew that the app experience for their tenants needed to reflect the uncompromising standards of their brand.
With a clear roadmap, the team leveraged trust, delegation, and the versatility of Atomic’s generalist developers to meet the tight deadline.
“The degree of talent that Atomic brought to bear on the problem space helped them earn the respect and the trust of everybody at Flow pretty much overnight, which made it a lot easier to just delegate and let things go,” said Ryder.
While Flow had solid developers in specific tech stacks, Atomic’s developers’ generalist backgrounds allowed them to flex between front-end and back-end work across iOS, Android, and web platforms. This adaptability was crucial for rapid development, enabling Atoms to transition across teams, fill process gaps, ask insightful questions, and require less onboarding for different platforms.
Upon delivery, Flow had a high-fidelity, robust, and scalable app that’s grown into the future requirements cleanly.
One Flow senior iOS engineer remarked, "It’s the best codebase I’ve seen in ten years,” while Ryder added, “They took the time and leveraged their experience to do it right from the beginning despite the pressure of the timeline.”
Empowering Flow's Future: Building a Strong Internal Team
Beyond delivering the app, Ryder knew building a full-stack internal team was crucial for Flow's long-term success. Atomic helped Flow staff up, ensuring they were set for success post-engagement.
Unlike other vendors, the Atomic team handled application development with minimal oversight. Over the course of the project, this gave Flow the bandwidth to hire nearly 50 full-time employees.
At the same time, their developers directly benefited from working alongside Atomic consultants, building upon Atomic’s strong development culture through their onboarding to the codebase, detailed documentation, pair programming, and ongoing collaboration and feedback.
“Atomic worked to pre-disseminate their knowledge. Instead of holding onto it and protecting it as Atomic’s, they freely gave away what needed to be given away for us to accelerate and move. That’s kind of unheard of in a dev shop partner,” said Ryder.
Results
- Feedback from clients has been extremely positive, and retention rates are up.
- Clients can better understand the program and see their progress, which helps them stick with the DMP to the end.
- Increased transparency means clients feel more confident about GreenPath.
Under the Hood
For the new client portal, Atomic developed a responsive, single-page web app.
GreenPath had security concerns about giving the web app access to the API. The middleware server gives GreenPath the ability to publish information from their CMS into the infrastructure of the single-page web app.
During development, GreenPath’s internal team updated their backend CMS and connected it with the new API. The two teams collaborated on technical challenges.
If we needed to figure out how to make something work, Atomic was always part of the solution. The communication was great. There was always flexibility to meet our needs in the fastest way possible. It was like working with our own internal team.
Coordinating Stakeholders
A Partnership with a Storybook Ending
The team’s careful project management, client communication, cutting-edge architecture, and cohesive design strategy helped the team ship the product on time and on budget.
Reflecting back on the multi-year, high-profile project, Robinson said Atomic helped his company arrive at a special moment in time.
“We'd never done anything this big. Ever,” he said. “We’re live across all the major pillars Atomic said they would deliver on. It was delivered on time, on budget, to expectation, live. Not three or four milestones late with people leaving and the platform half-baked and full of bugs.”
StoryLoom began open-beta in December 2022. A global launch is scheduled for the spring of 2023.
“We’ve been given a rare opportunity," said Robinson, "to find success by chasing opportunities Starship Enterprise-style: going where people aren’t—pushing boundaries.”
Member of the DMP Facebook Community
The Atomic Team
Here are some of our current Atoms who worked on this project. Click their photo to read their bios!
Project domain(s)
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