How Might We… helping users who are just starting to learn/manage their finances?
ROLE
Primary Designer
(made for Interaction Design course)
Branding & Identity
Prototyping
UI/UX
User Interviewing
Usability Testing
Product Design
3 weeks
November 2023
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.
My Role
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.
penny for your thoughts
User Research
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.
put all your eggs in one basket
How Might We…
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?"
User Personas
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.
Project Proposal: milf (man i love finance)
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.
put your money where your mouth is
UI Sketch
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.
Lo-Fis
App Content Lo-Fis
User Testing Feedback
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.
Financial Concept of the Day
Bookmarking Articles
Things to Consider
Looking to the future of this app, there are many features of this app that still remain to be addressed.
First, the future impact of the app needs to be considered. At the moment, the app works well for the purpose of a user new to financial literacy, but how would the app serve a user over the course of their career? Maybe this would look like changes in the level of technical difficulty of terms as a user learns and grows more confident in their financial literacy levels. Placement exams can be developed and implemented to gauge a user’s financial literacy level.
Another big question is determining the difference between women and other genders in terms of spending. Is there really a big difference in how they spend and different topics of interest? Seeing how this app targets a predominately female demographic, additional secondary and primary research would be necessary in order to really figure out what information is most relevant.
Reflection
Starting this project, I was nervous and apprehensive. Especially given how not confident I was in my financial literacy, it was hard to imagine designing an app that would teach others financial literacy. However, what was emphasized the most in this project was the importance of research. By being forced to design in a topic subject area I was unfamiliar with, it was so much more important to do user research and usability audits in order to create a successful application.
Thinking of my own experiences, I recognized how I learn best when I am having fun. Finance has always been an intimidating topic for both myself and a lot of my friends, so with this platform, I aimed to make it less intimidating and more approachable of a subject matter. I feel I was successful in this endeavor by focusing on the brand and how all the elements reflect the brand personality that I was aiming for. In addition, when converting to high fidelity frames, I made sure the copy would best represent the voice I had imagined for the app as well.
In the end, I am quite proud of the work I had accomplished with this project and know that the skills I gained as a designer will accelerate my design work in the future as well.
