Case Study : Stax
We were assigned to choose our own challenge from a group of 5 predetermined scenarios. Our group was composed of myself and two others. As we were all doing this for the first time we decided to go with the challenge we knew we could get some great research on.
“With this design challenge, you’ll work in a team to find ways you can help individuals increase their
financial literacy to avoid debt, plan for retirement, budget, and increase their understanding of how
money works.”
Defining the Issue
As a group, we had a very hard time defining our problem. We went back an forth on the direction that we wanted to take the project. Since we didn’t have a CEO or Product Manager driving our direction spent a few days considering all of our options. The user base that we wanted to start gathering research on was our biggest obstacle.
After another session at the whiteboard, we had to move forward. To pick a user base we started with a broad group and then would narrow down to very specific groups.
We all came to the consensus that we wanted to assist people who are self-employed. After more discussion, we identified that people who work at Salon’s might be a good place to start our research. Our reasoning on that was, Cosmetology school can be quite expensive, so they likely have debt, their wages can fluctuate due to the clientele, income can be low, to begin with.
What Motivates Them?
We brainstormed on the questions that we needed answers to and set out to gather data. Between us, we had multiple in-depth interviews. With research, it feels natural for us to look for affirmations in our prior assumptions. I pushed myself to ask one more question even I there was a pause or if I didn’t quite know to ask it.
One of the examples that stood out to me was asking how they keep track of their finances. “How do you keep track of your income?” Lead us to how many bank accounts they have. We found that many people did not have a dedicated business account. That is great to know but why not have multiple accounts? So we asked that. Which got us to a deeper point of pain that it is too difficult to manage personal and business and then try to rectify that at the end of the year. This insight changed our direction as we discovered that all of the research pointed us to budgeting and tax preparation throughout the whole year.
What We Know So Far
We found that our users are willing to cope with managing their own finances that comes with running their own business due to the freedom. They trade the normal 9–5 grind for a different kind of work. The tradeoff for stability is for freedom. We also found our users liked having no ceiling on the income that they could make. The more they worked the more they made. We had cases where some were happy making the money that they did and weren’t pursuing new business but others that were hoping to own a salon one day.
What Does the Current Landscape Look Like?
Threats- There are many well-established apps that strive to be enterprise management for these groups of people. Knowledge of excel can replace what we are going to display.
The aim of the project is to help self-employed individuals be able to quickly and easily manage their finances. They will be able to budget, save invoices, and save money without much effort.
We are designing this because we have seen some major pain points that self-employed individuals all have in common, including but not limited to, setting goals and preparing for tax time. This is a major opportunity to break into the program designing industry with a tool that can change lives.
Our audience is mainly late 20’s, early 30-year-olds that are self-employed or strive to be self-employed.
Our competitors will be companies like TurboTax, H&R Block, private accountants etc. They are telling the audience how simple it is to do their taxes or have someone else do their taxes. Other personal budgeting apps that have been in the market for a long time like Mint, YNAB, Excel.
We should be communicating in such a way that there isn’t so much jargon it becomes frustrating for the user. We will need to break down the steps of invoicing, saving, planning, doing taxes and anything else related to financing. We are building our brand to be comfortable with talking to your friend about why you want to save or why taxes are a pain.
We will need to include disclaimers that we are not a tax service, legal and banking regulations will need to be included.
Jobs To Be Done
From our research, we started to build our story map. We knew that seeing the savings goal would be important, setting the savings goals, and adding and taking expenses.
As we built this out we did work individually to create the jobs to be done and the meet together to collaborate. We were all mostly on the same page and we created our first version.
The story the came together and we did confirm that our users would have to create an account so that they could quickly come back into the application and see where they stand with their goals.
Ideation and WireFrames
We drew out the initial ideas on what this would look like on paper and once we had a few ideas down we tuned to Balsamiq to create these rough ideas. We knew we needed the main dashboard, determining the savings goal, and adding income and expenses.
You can see that the bases of all these functions would be accomplished but they were not done in the same format or language. This would be a theme as the three of us attempted to get on the same pages in this project.
Learning Sketch
Once we had finessed those wireframes we set to sketch. When we came back the first time we had once again three versions of the project. Since this was all our first time working in Sketch I would say that it was very basic... We had not gone over Visual design at this point and it showed we had a different name for the project. You can see my first attempt at the dashboard and the other parts from the team members.
At this time we had one our team members that would eventually drop the class and so those parts of the system would not get baked like we had hoped. As our time to complete this project was coming to a close we would work as much as we can to get this done but could have used another week or so to accommodate learning in Sketch.
As it stood at the deadline we were not able to deliver a working prototype and to me, this was a major blow to my confidence. I was not excited with what we had to present and was excited to move onto the next challenge.
Sketch Updates
I couldn’t stand to let all the research and investment go to waste and have nothing to show for this. Each night for a few weeks I would spend time going back to our design to try to see where I could make improvements. The biggest jump in design was on the dashboard screen. While I am not completely happy I believe that it shows great growth in my design eye in just a few short weeks. This was combined with learning Sketch better and it could almost be a viable product.
I still struggled with the visuals on these two screens but I believe the core actions are there and much better than the intial versions.
What Did I Learn?
With this being the very first design challenge that I had ever attempted and the dynamic of the group, I think things could have gone better. If I knew what I knew now I think I would have raised the user up to self-employed to allow a greater user base. With that change, it would impact the styling choices and how we approached goals.
I feel like where we left this as a team and where I was able to facelift this was probably the biggest part of learning for me. Taking the core of our research and user story and trying to flesh that out took a lot more thought that I had initially expected.
This really opened my eyes to the amount of effort that needs to go into the design to get it right. Good design does not just happen and it takes time and skills to make it get out of the way of the user so that they can achieve their goals.
If you have questions about this project or anything else don’t hesitate to reach out to me via my contact info or read my other case studies.
