How might we encourage young adults to live a financially sustainable life? (Part 2)
The intention of searching for happiness is a common drive for most people, but the things that can fulfil are different for each person. Naturally this very much depends on many things, but we can observe patterns, especially on a generation scale. Finastra Labs has started a Human-Centered Design project to research this problem.
This is a multi-part article. You can find the other parts here:
part1, part2 (current), part3
The previous article was about finding, defining and start working on a design challenge. We quickly found out the hard part is not conducting end-user interviews but processing the huge pile of information and noise that comes out of them. With good methods, great effort and smart people we’ve come over that and created an entertaining concept of a financial education app.
Fortunately we knew that a good-looking concept without validation is a dangerous thing. So we organized some user test sessions and at this point we had to say goodbye to “Jen and Berry”, because our testers didn’t love them as much as we did ;(
And here the journey continues with this book:
Someone from the Finastra Labs team heard about this so called Design Sprint methodology that Google Ventures is using too to work on new ideas and big problems.
GV gives the below description about what Design Sprint is.
The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. […] it’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more — packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.
Basically it’s a 5-day agenda, stuffed with battle-tested methods of problem exploration and solving. And healthy snacks. Lots of healthy snacks in the room. Always.
Preparations
So, we bought the book and organized our first Design Sprint in a few hours. Nah, kidding! Actually it happened to be really hard to get fully prepared for the week. As you would probably guess there is no ideal time for a whole week workshop. So, the first and hardest challenge is to find the time. Ideally we would have the best possible team for the session but apparently the devil lives in Microsoft Outlook calendars. Anyway, after a few days of struggle the date has been pinpointed with the location and the participants too. Yay!
The Sprint
This is how a Design Sprint looks like. If you are not familiar with it digest a little bit the image and check this 1 minute video. I’m not gonna write in details about the Design Sprint methodology because there are better resources (most importantly the Sprint book), instead I’m gonna share our experiences during our very first sprint.
- The agenda is really tight. Every single team member has to be disciplined and undistracted in order to keep the timetable. Or the Facilitator has to be an a-hole, but nobody wants to be that. So just grow up, act like an adult, put away your phone and be focused! Actually the sprint is real fun if you get into the flow.
- Pay attention to the details of the methodology! For example accurately track the progress of the agenda. Some tasks are daunting but the moment when you cross-out them from the to-do list it can cheer you up and give satisfaction. Also keep out laptops and mobiles! This is key to maintain focus. But keep the brakes, stop working and relax (or reply calls and emails if necessary).
- If you already have lots of post-its then I recommend you to get some more, because you will need them :)
- We had ambivalent experiences with the expert interviews. Got 1 internal (PFM product manager) and 2 really good external interview subjects (CEO of PFM startup, personal finance consultant/blogger). But makin’ interviews is not as easy task as we thought. We lost a huge amount of time because we were nice to the people, listened to all of their stories, never interrupted them. So time went by, we made friends, learned a few things, but we were like an hour behind the schedule. Bye-bye light lunch?
- The map is a good indicator for how deep is our challenge — in our case it is relatively high level, but it must be, because we design a complete app, not just a feature.
- Even with a very detailed and straightforward guideline it was not 100% sure that we are on the right track. But it’s not a problem if we can’t see the whole picture during the day, because at the end of the day every single piece will fall into its place.
- If you’re doing design sprint the first time I advice you to switch the facilitator role for each day. So everybody can get the feeling of being the bad guy in the room. Empathy can’t be overrated!
- About the Crazy Eight… well, it’s crazy but it works. One could be frustrated or even angry during the task and it’s okay. It’s a good sign. It means time pressure is doing its job. The secret is to keep pushing it. First few ideas are generally old ideas, consider them as a warm-up. Then you start thinking on new ones. Then you are empty. Then you have some silly ideas. Then probably the time is up and you look at your paper and it doesn’t make any sense and you feel stupid. And that’s ok, because the essence of crazy eight is when you present your things (ideas?) and the others have fun hearing them and get inspired to come up with new ones. Facilitators, keep your sharpies sharp because the best ideas are comin’ and you have to note them!
- Voting on ideas can be tricky because there are many variations and some people can be passionate about democracy, but according to our experience it doesn’t really change the end result. So just pick the voting rules that the team is comfortable with and stick to it.
- Storyboard making is the most challenging task for our team. Since the first sprint we had a few more and this is always problematic. 75% of the time we just keep redrawing the very first screen. Maybe we should just pick one person (probably a UX designer), give 15 minutes for her/him to create a full draft while the others having a break. Then we have something we can iterate.
- Prototyping is like hackathon on steroids. You have very short amount of time to build something for a project that you barely know. You have to be creative and find shortcuts but don’t miss the important goals.
- For many people the design sprint’s last day is the first time when they actually see a user test. It is really exciting and emotional. If all goes well by the end of the tests you are keen to fix the bugs and implement the new ideas but unfortunately the week has ended.
Let’s meet our testers (not really) and our conclusions:
- Georgia Girl: Student only for the coupon. It happens but still :(
- Coder Guy: This is true, you should never invite a coder (analytical mindset)!
- Irish Preliminary Teacher: Best test person, talkative resulting with very important feedbacks
- An Irish Bartender: A bit more alcohol level than necessary
- Mr. Notcoming: Late cancellation due to friend’s accident :(
20% is not the best but it could have been worse. At least we tip our toe into this field and learned a lot in the meantime. //Even more details of the lessons learnt are available here
The Concept
At the end of this design sprint we came up with an app concept, specifically designed for young adults. The user has to enter a short term goal, a mid term goal and a so called smart goal. The first two can be anything and the app assists to achieve them but the smart goal is mandatory coming from us directly. This way we can educate the user to have a more sustainable financial life. Or at least this is the intention.
We created a high-fidelity, interactive prototype and continued the testing and the results was quite good, so we decided to go on with this concept and make it real.
The third part of this series will be about the final app that we developed. Stay tuned if you love cat gifs and emojis!
This is a multi-part article. You can find the other parts here:
part1, part2 (current), part3
