Spire Guest Membership
Most financial apps ask you to commit before you've seen anything. Guest membership flipped that. I designed the experience that gave prospects a reason to stay — and a frictionless path to commit. By end of 2021, the GM pathway accounted for 6,663 account openings, representing 23% of all in-app account openings that year.
Role: Lead UX Designer · Product: Fidelity Spire · Platform: iOS & Android · Year: 2020
The Team: I led the design for Guest Membership as a horizontal effort across six squads. While Onboarding, Track, and Accounts were aligned to the Spire roadmap, the Security team (sign-up) operated on an external, separate timeline.
My Role: I acted as the connective thread across these squads to reconcile conflicting roadmaps and ensure a coherent user journey from registration through to account management.
Objective: Design Fidelity’s first prospect-level mobile experience, allowing users to explore Spire before opening an account.
Success Metric: Increase total account openings by capturing the prospect segment.
Every decision in Guest Membership was made with one user in mind
Trish is a millennial in her late 20s to mid-30s, balancing debt and savings goals, fee-averse, and deeply skeptical of financial institutions. She needed to see the product before she could trust it. GM was designed to give her that. More about Spire →
Release Roadmap
Early 2020
Internal pilot
Customer-only launch. Login, Track, Accounts, More
April 2020
Company-wide
Improvements + Decision tool
July 29, 2020
National release
Guest Membership goes live
The core constraint
Opening financial accounts before seeing an experience was a main deterrent for prospects. In traditional financial services there is no ‘profile’ without a financial account.
financial account = access to financial platforms
The insight
“I don’t know how helpful (this app) is going to be because I can’t see how it’s going to work. In my situation because I don’t have an account, I can’t see how it functions…”
How might we create an experience with least number of friction points to convert prospect and become guest members?
Hypothesis
If we remove friction (decouple sign-up from account opening) and give prospects access to the features customers value (Track and Accounts), they'll experience value before committing and conversion will increase.
Guest membership was born
I pushed for guest membership, knowing this was the only way a prospect could experience truly personalized experience, learn about whats “behind a wall” without a financial account and experiencing value before committing.
Demo Mode ✗
Fake data, simulated experience
Nothing persists — start over at sign-up
Doesn't build trust — builds skepticism
Guest Membership ✓
Your goals, your data
Real Fidelity profile created
Everything transfers at account opening
Demo mode was the obvious answer. Guest Membership was the right one. The goal was simple: make signing up fast enough that hesitation never has a chance to set in.
Registration experience skeleton architecture — three sequential steps map prospect information directly into account opening, eliminating redundant data entry
Key achitectural decisions was making sign-up do double duty — the information a prospect entered to become a guest member carried forward seamlessly into account opening when the guest member is ready to convert in core experince. The focus was to make sign up form collect the minimum needed — name, phone, email, then credentials. Credentials created here transfer to a full customer-level account after account opening — no redundant entry, no starting over, nothing asked twice or before it's needed.
Goal information transfers from guest membership into the full experience
Enrollment details feed directly into account opening
Credentials carry over to a customer-level account after converting
At a glance
Fresh install
Fresh install flow — new users move through app intro screens before reaching the login/registration fork. Prospects route through sign-up, OTP verification, and credential creation before landing in the GM experience.
Returning user
Returning user flow — existing customers and guest members bypass onboarding entirely, authenticating via login or biometrics.
Step 1: Entry points
Four different use cases. How many entry points?
Two intro screen iterations — evaluating how clearly the entry point communicated the app's value to prospects before asking them to commit to signing up.
Entry points for different users had to be established. Fresh install required orienting prospects with no Fidelity data, returning Guest member, customers and customers who forgot they have a Fidelity relationship.
Step 2: Signing up
Two sign-up form approaches — paginated (top) versus single scrollable page with advancing fields (bottom). Keyboard persistence and field advancement on the single-page version reduced disorientation during mobile input.
We explored two approaches — splitting the form across pages versus keeping everything on one scrollable view. The keyboard behavior on mobile made this more nuanced than it sounds: fields needed to advance naturally as each was completed, keeping the user oriented without losing their place.
Step 3: Credential creation
Speed matters during sign-up — any moment of friction is a reason to abandon. I explored live inline validation for username availability and password requirements, testing it against static requirement lists to see which helped users move faster and with more confidence.
Testing: Sign up study
Usability testing surfaced three clear signals:
Prospects completed sign-up faster and with fewer errors using real-time inline validation than static requirement lists
Prospects feel comfortable using Face ID / biometric login to open an account. (Although people wanted the ability to make a username/password as a backup in case they didn’t feel comfortable.)
Prospects understand when they sign up for guest membership, they have not opened an account with Fidelity
Post registration: Core Guest member experience
Post-registration experience mapping — identifying which app sections could carry over to guest members versus which required redesign. Accounts was the critical open question; More was largely reusable with credential management as the key function.
Once registered, a guest member landed in a version of the app where most of the experience carried over — but not all of it worked the same way. Goals could be selected in onboarding, tracking required an account, learn was fully available. Track, Accounts, and More needed decisions. The diagram maps what was shareable, what needed reconfiguration, and what remained open — with Accounts as the central unresolved question.
Accounts page purpose and design
The Accounts tab had no clear brief for guest members. It couldn't show accounts — there weren't any. But leaving it empty wasn't an option either. We had to figure out what this space should even be before we could design it. The explorations below weren't about polish — they were about answering a more fundamental question: could this tab become a conversion surface, and if so, how?
Two concepts for the Accounts tab — concept 1 routes users from the nav item to an account selection modal tied to their goals; concept 2 treats the tab itself as an exploratory space, framing the absence of an account as a starting point rather than a gap.
The approach was to treat it as an education surface — not a blank state. Rather than showing nothing, the tab surfaced account options matched to the goals a guest member had already selected during onboarding. The goal throughline that started at sign-up carried directly into this page, so the account recommendations felt personal rather than generic.
A quant survey and image annotation study
To test whether language or design was doing more of the work, I ran a quantitative survey paired with an image annotation study — participants flagged exactly what felt helpful or confusing directly on the screen, then answered follow-up questions.
The clearest insight: users immediately understood the accounts screen as a place to see their balances — and wanted that information front and center. $0.00 at the top wasn't just a design preference, it was an expectation.
Goal-based account layout: accounts listed in the order goals selected during onboarding, so the products shown felt relevant to why the user signed up in the first place.
Intent based layout: accounts grouped by user intent, making the page scannable regardless of what the user selected at onboarding
Quick pivot solution
The security team face an upstream team dependency causing misalignment with Spire's launch and risking server-side persistence delivery. I pushed the idea of saving data locally and design a returning user flow. Spire shippped with client-side persistence while server-side caught up.
Fallback entry point — a temporary registration bridge designed while upstream team dependencies were resolved.
Results
65% ≈ 64% prospects visited Accounts at the same rate as customers, indicating intent was never the issue.
6,663 guest members converted to full accounts
23% of all in-app account openings in 2021
Prospects given the same access as customers behaved like customers. 65% visited the Accounts tab — compared to 64% of customers. 35% engaged with Track, vs. 36% of customers. The data confirmed what the design assumed: the gate was the problem, not the product.
Reflection
If I were doing this again, I'd push for an explicit technical feasibility checkpoint early and not just standing progress meetings, but a dedicated conversation across squads about cross-team dependencies. The server-side persistence constraint was discovered late because it lived in the gap between teams, not in anyone's individual update.
Prototype reflects the full release, backend infrastructure enabled, prospect profiles live and interim solution retired.
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