Case Study: Financial Literacy

For my very first UX adventure, we were given the opportunity to design a product that would help to improve the financial situations of individuals that need the assistance.

This project, for me, was strictly a learning experience. I had never worked in UXD before this, so it was definitely a crash-course in User Experience.

Statistics and prompt

As financial literacy is such a broad subject we decided to focus on a specific group of individuals. We were also working on this project around tax time, which we know can be one of the most frustrating times of the year.

The group of tax payers we chose to focus on was variable income individuals with jobs such as hair dressers, personal trainers, photographers, make up artists and so on.

Research

Instead of asking our interviewees a string of questions, we chose to let them begin by telling us their stories. Luckily there is no shortage of hair dressers so we were able to get plenty of interviews done.

With the data we gathered from our interviews, we were able to create a persona to focus on while designing our product.

Ideating

Unfortunately I learned one major lesson during this project, and that was if you are going to use Balsamiq then you should pay for it or download your work so your wireframes don’t get lost. I lost my wireframes because I did not download them and they were deleted by Balsamiq. Since this happened, I’ve used Sketch and InVision for everything I’ve done.

Luckily for me, one of my group-mates still had our wireframes available!

This is a few of the wireframes we had available. They are not the complete screens as we were running out of time and had to move on to HiFi.

Here is a little piece of our wireframing. This would have been the sign up page. As you can see, this is nowhere near complete as the fonts are not finalized, the buttons don’t look like buttons, etc.

HiFi sketching

I will show you some pages I designed below. As part of our program, I wanted to have a tax calculator integrated so that the user could figure out what they were on track to owe the upcoming tax season. This piece was my baby and I really wanted it to work.

This was my first iteration of my tax calculator pages. I got a lot of feedback on this because the pages are a bit hard to read, the colors were a bit much, and the background picture was distracting.

The feedback helped me a lot. I was also taught to go through websites like Dribbble and look through other projects to see what designs were trending.

You can see my updated pages below. They are not perfect by any means, but they are a lot better.

This is where we ran out of time. I would like to revisit this project — spruce it up, make it something that can actually be used.

We weren’t able to usability test which is highly beneficial when you’re designing a program. When I come back to this project, I will be completing the prototype and taking to the streets to have it tested out. Ideally, this would be an extremely helpful program for hairdressers and the like as it would remove some of the stress of saving for and paying taxes.

In conclusion

As I’ve said many times, I learned a lot from this project. We took so long to choose our focus that we lost a lot of actual working time, my wireframes were lost, without a design guide it’s hard to create HiFi pages separately and then put them all together and when it comes to actually designing pages, less is more.

My second case study was much easier after all of the learning I did during this one.