Introducing the Financial Confidence Playbook: A Guide to Finding Faster Product-Market Fit at the Last Mile
Celebrating the work that we’ve done at IDEO Last Mile Money since 2019 — and sharing it with our community
What’s the best way to celebrate your fourth birthday? By inviting everyone to the party, of course! We wanted to take a moment to celebrate the work that we’ve done at IDEO Last Mile Money since 2019 — and find a way to share what we’ve learned with our community.
With that in mind, we’re proud to announce the release of the Financial Confidence Playbook — a design guide to help product teams building digital financial services for the last mile.
Check out the Financial Confidence Playbook spotlight in Fast Company.
In the last four years, we’ve prototyped and launched 100+ products and our design work has reached millions of users in emerging markets. The Financial Confidence Playbook is a collection of our go-to design patterns when designing for the unique needs of low-income, underbanked, and underserved communities. It features ideas and approaches from products at various stages — from pilot to scale, bringing together design principles and UI/UX interactions.
Product teams on quick timelines are looking for more insights when it comes to last mile users and their challenges in order to ship products that resonate. We hope this resource can inspire others who share our vision of financial inclusion for all.
Keep reading to learn more about the Playbook — what it is, why we created it, and what it offers product teams looking to reach users at the last mile.
“This resource library is indispensable if you’re aiming to develop technology tailored precisely for the challenges of emerging markets. Our toolkit has seamlessly incorporated these last-mile best practices, allowing the finance community to easily access them via our user-friendly low-code platform.” — Iago Silva, Product Manager, Waynbo
Why financial confidence?
In 2020, we launched the Digital Confidence design tools with Google Next Billion Users. Over the past three years, Digital Confidence has been accessed by thousands of people, and our partners have applied its principles, methods, and best practices to build better products for new internet users.
Today, the Financial Confidence Playbook takes our Digital Confidence work one step further by showcasing actionable insights and contextualizing these ideas for financial frontiers. Building on real-life examples of our work at Last Mile Money, the Playbook shares why these users need specific features, cues, and support to feel confident interacting with a new financial product or service.
For example, referencing a project with Jocata, CGAP shares how IDEO Last Mile Money’s expertise helped “ensure that the UX for the app is a simple, intuitive, and visual solution for an audience with low literacy/low digital literacy rates. This resulted in what will be a lending journey based primarily on icons, with no small text or complicated disclosures, and with easy-to-understand information about each step and the documentation required to complete the application process.”
Small design considerations can have a big impact on the user experience, helping businesses find product-market fit — faster.
Design for the last mile looks different
What makes last mile design different from good design? At the last mile, the stakes are especially high where one small mistake can cost a lot.
Today, close to a million people will come online for the first time in their lives. Connecting to the digital economy can help them discover new opportunities to earn more, transact efficiently and securely, and boost their financial well-being. But the world of digital financial services can feel unfamiliar and threatening, particularly to those who have never navigated the world of formal finance. Trust isn’t a given, and these new users need clear communication about where their money is going. Actions that might be automatically understood by experienced internet users can appear novel or scary to those using digital financial services for the first time.
We believe that a better future is possible, but it will take thoughtful design.
“This library reduces my product research time and makes it better, because this is better UI than I would find on my own…It feels like an aggregation of good design in one place.” — Eric Cuellar, Co-Founder, Node Finance
How to get started
To start using the playbook, head over to the website. Within the Playbook, teams can explore across use cases or product flows. From reviewing best practices for remittances to exploring must-haves for onboarding flows — teams have access to a wealth of proven resources they can put into practice today, helping them level up their offerings and design for greater adoption.
We also offer a Figma Library for those who want to dig deeper with end-to-end flows from our work — use those to pull in quick visual inspiration, learn about key steps in your product journey, and engage your team in a conversation.
A big thank you to our partners for helping to bring the Financial Confidence Playbook to life. We could not have done this without our community. 🧡
