Whales
UX Project
When I was in college, I had savings from working a summer job (let’s say $2500 to keep it simple), which did not include my scholarships for living expenses, so bump up the total to $4000.
I used my bank account balance as my budget guide. I kept my guide simple by dividing the total savings ($4000) by 16 weeks (one semester),which meant my budget was $250 a week for eating, laundry, and partying.
By the end of the semester, I was eating Ramen and asking friends if they could buy me a burrito for my daily substance. I could not stick to a budget, let alone invest.
College students and young professionals lack financial literacy since schools do not teach or offer personal financial management education.
I am designing a learning platform for college students and young professionals to learn personal financial management.
Gathering data started general and broad; we needed to focus on how users received their information: social media, articles, books, parents, etc.
In addition, we looked at the competition and how their business model worked. Examining competitive budget apps, Mint (Intuit) and You Need A Budget, allowed us to generate a pros and cons list based on using the application and reading application comments. Also, we looked at the investment apps: Acorn and Webull to analyze how each company utilized EFT and Options trading on their platform.
We targeted our audience’s demographics towards college students and young professionals (YP) because a lot of the budget and investment competitors were for working individuals who wanted to track expenses or invest extra money in stocks or cryptocurrency.
Using Google Forms and a network of college students who attend the University of Washington, Seattle, and UX/UI groups on Slack,Discord, and Facebook.
We received thirty (30) responses and analyzed the responses by filtering and categorizing the responses in Miro.
Lessons learned #1: The survey responses we received informed us of a need for financial education, but we did not know the user's existing knowledge and daily financial app usage. Our attempt to ask for knowledge of Mint, Excel, and Acorn, did not help us. We could have made this question individual software and multiple check-box to specifically track usage.
Using a combination of Excel to filter survey data and Miro to categorize data, our team decided to focus on a specific demographic and create two personas to help us create our problem statement.
To help us create our problem statement, we used the “How MightWe” method for focusing on the demographic, goal, and measurable outcome/goal.
An empathy map and mind mapping of the user's feedback were important for the design criteria and, above all, for generating ideas for the product to help educate our targeted users. Furthermore, we placed ourselves inside the user’s shoes by creating user flows. The user flows made us think, “how might I focus my attention on educating myself on budgets and investment?”
These crucial empathic steps were essential for producing low-fidelity sketches and design features for the product.
Side note: I wanted to add a design exercise to our product, but I did not have time.
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Prior to starting the mobile prototype, we need to create some information architecture to help organize the pages and sections for a cohesive design. Furthermore, we created a mood board to help us with the direction and inspiration for the brand, user interface, and product attributes (e.g., trustworthiness).By creating the mood board, we created a color palette, and I created the logo design for the product using Procreate.
Each member was responsible for a page and design feature; I created the budget section because I was interested in breaking down and categorizing budget line items for the user to identify spent and saved costs. Also, I previously made some sketches showing the drop-down header and ideas for radial buttons and information regarding financial health.
Improving the product if we had more time would be re-writing our survey questions for specific user information regarding existing experience. Also, we would ask the users to test our prototype for feedback and analyze our findings.
