How Might We… helping users who are just starting to learn/manage their finances?
Branding & Identity
Prototyping
User Interviewing
Usability Testing
3 weeks
Onboarding Flow
milf, a mobile application that aims to make explaining and improving financial literacy approachable and digestible specifically for young women.
Financial literacy and longevity planning are crucial for college students but are often not taught in school. The exploration of design opportunities to implement a digital intervention led to the start of milf.
Goal: Discover and implement a digital intervention that helps college students with financial literacy and longevity planning.
The research section of this project was done with my team then I carried out the remainder myself.
As the sole designer, I developed a design system to ensure consistency and coherence across the platform. I developed the branding and carried out the UI/UX and prototyping myself.
research: penny for your thoughts
In order to best understand the pain points and bright points of users, we conducted user interviews with candidates at varying points of their financial journey and have their pain points summarized below.
Pain Points
Consistency
Being consistent with tracking your purchases and spending habits can be annoying. If you’re not consistent with logging in your spending, there’s really no use of tracking things.
Paywall
A lot of good financial applications have a paywall (one time payment, but most are subscription). This makes them inaccessible for a lot of college students.
Complexity
Many college students only know personal financial literacy. They don’t know many things about investments.
identifying the problem: put all your eggs in one basket
After identifying and organizing the pain points, we crafted a range of "How Might We" statements to target and categorize them. From these, I chose to focus on supporting users who are just beginning their financial journeys.
"How Might We… helping users who are just starting to learn/manage their finances?"
In order to best understand our target audience, I created a persona. Meet Amanda, a 21-year-old college student striving to improve her financial literacy. Despite her strong motivation, Amanda struggles to find time and resources specifically designed to meet her needs, making it challenging to deepen her understanding and achieve her financial goals.
After brainstorming different project proposals, milf was born. milf (man I love finance) is a learning platform that helps explain financial terms in a way that helps young girls understand.
Observed Challenge
For users who are not familiar with financial terms, it can often be very overwhelming. Especially for younger female users, it often feels like financial literacy is a very male dominated area.
Design Goal
Explain financial terms in a non-threatening and fun way that is able to help a younger female demographic understand.
Interface Solution
A learning platform that helps explain financial terms in a way to help teenage girls understand.
the process: put your money where your mouth is
Workflow & Sitemap
User opens the app and goes through the onboarding process and chooses which topics interest them the most
Home page is populated with suggested podcasts, articles, and videos
User can search within topic category or search directly for a topic
Screen fills with whichever content they choose
Chat option to directly converse with an AI
To envision the design of my mobile app, I began by hand-sketching frames and mapping out the primary user workflows. This process helped me focus on the app's core functionality and ensure a seamless user experience before diving into digital tools.
App Content Lo-Fis
Before progressing to high-fidelity designs and applying branding, I conducted user testing with three individuals. This allowed me to identify potential improvements and ensure the design aligned with user needs and expectations.
While there weren't big hiccups of users being able to achieve the goal of finding an article, the biggest consideration that was highlighted during user testing was the question of how to ensure this was truly a literacy platform.
To ensure that the app served as a literacy platform, I implemented new features such as a “Financial Concept of the Day”, introducing users to key financial terms paired with an activity to solidify learning. I also added the feature to ensure users were able to bookmark articles into collections for later reference, enhancing the app’s usability as an educational tool.
Bookmarking Articles
Starting this project, I quickly realized the importance of conducting research before diving into design. While it can be tempting to immediately begin creating screens, this project reinforced how essential it is to first understand the users, their needs, and the problem space. Through user research and competitive analysis, I was able to make more intentional design decisions rooted in real insights rather than assumptions.
I also learned the importance of user testing in validating designs. Although there were moments where I felt confident in certain interactions, usability testing often revealed areas that could be simplified or improved. Watching users interact with the product emphasized that successful design is not just visually appealing, but intuitive and accessible as well.
Overall, this project strengthened my appreciation for research, iteration, and designing with empathy. The skills I gained throughout this process will continue to shape my work as a designer moving forward.
