Financial literacy for millennials

Designing to make personal financial planning simple to understand and easy to manage

Capstone project designed as part of UC San Diego’s Interaction Design Specialization course on Coursera.

My observation center around the design brief for change in personal behavior. I wanted to learn about the habits of people when planning and managing their personal finance. I wanted to design interface that facilitates a personal change in the way millennials plan and track their expenditure.

Research

Participant walking me through their process

I asked participants to track their expenditure for a week, using a diary study that prompts the participants daily through a mobile application. I scheduled the study on the last week of the month, increasing the opportunity for the participants to engage in reviewing their monthly expense.

During the study, participants were prompted to record moments when they make daily transactions, and the reasons for keeping/not keeping track of that particular purchase. At the end of the week, they were tasked to walk me through how they usually plan their monthly/annual budget and if they were using any application to assist them with their tracking. I found that majority of the participants were not successful in tracking their expenses by recording their daily transactions.

Ideation & Prototyping

With the research insights in mind, I decided on the following key goals for a mobile application to track expenses and create budgets:

• Unified platform for various financial institutes and services
• Automated categorisation of expenses
• Ease of budget creation and optimisation

With clear goals set, the next step was translating how we would want to achieve these goals through a user validated process. I set out to design a low-fidelity prototype that could be tested with participants. Their feedback early in the design process helped shape key features that were crucial to the application.

Wireframes and Heuristics

At this point, I was more than comfortable to switch my designing process over to Sketch. Having prior experience in user interface design, I was familiar with the rapid prototyping process. Working with template assets that fits the feature and its intentional actions. No design is complete without validation, so I opted for a preliminary heuristic evaluation from my course peers. In addition, the design was also tested with primary users who provided an insight to the way they interact with the designed solution.

In-person testing for feedback with intended users

Online A/B Testing

Based on the findings from the in-person testing with primary users, I was able to identify common problems that were obstructing the user’s ability to complete their tasks. I decided to implement much of the requested and identified changes. Making distinct modifications that were subjected to further testing. By doing so, I had an alternative design based on the feedback that was composed as part of an A/B testing conducted using UserTesting. The results were then determined by the rate of success of specific tasks.

Final Thoughts

This project was designed to meet the needs of those who have been managing or tracking their expenses. Providing the necessary tools such as budget planning, purchase notifications and logging of expenses. Ultimately, I wanted to design a solution that facilitates a personal behavioural change in tracking and managing daily transactions and expenses. This design project has provided an avenue in validating assumptions of managing the spending habits of millennials. In the near future, I hope to pursue with the stretch goal of providing analytical insights in spending habits by aggregating data from various cashless payment options in the market.