Finding Numo: MHCI Capstone Week 1–2
MHCI Capstone Week 0–2
Three weeks ago we received our capstone assignments via email from CMU’s MHCI program. Our group received numo as their client. Numo is a fintech company that has PNC as its parent company. Our project for them is to work on card linking offers (CLO’s) for debit cards and to develop metrics to measure the success of these CLO’s.
During the past two weeks, we have met our advisors, Rita Lee and Jason Spector, two incredibly experienced and knowledgeable professionals with a wealth of experience in design and research. We have done our background research, met our clients, completed our kick-off. We also did a team bonding exercise: an escape room! We didn’t escape, but we learned we work great together and we share responsibilities well.
Dream Team
Our five-person team was put together to represent a wide range of backgrounds and abilities spanning all aspects of HCI. Our five interdisciplinary members are as follows:
Mia Manavalan: Project Manager
Mia graduated from Northwestern University with a Bachelors's in Cognitive Science and Economics. After, she worked at IBM as a technology consultant in the Cognitive Business Decision sector. She worked with clients to implement Watson solutions, such as- conversation agents and predictive technologies for the retail and healthcare industries. As an MHCI student, she is taking courses in Mobile & IoT Technologies, Persuasive Design, and is doing an independent research project on improving machine learning and data visualization dashboards for physicians.
Lauren Whittingham: Product Manager
Lauren Whittingham worked for four years in a medical device and imaging company, after graduating from UC Berkeley with a BS in Mechanical Engineering. Inspired by her work managing new software projects, she decided to pursue UX. She worked for several startups in the Bay Area as a UX Research and Design Consultant before joining CMU’s MHCI program. She has taken courses in Persuasive Design and Machine Learning and is currently studying Lean Entrepreneurship, Document Design, and Service Design.
Kyle Barron: Research Lead
Kyle graduated from the University of Wisconsin — Madison in 2018 with a B.S. in psychology, as well as a minor in computer science. He is interested in user research, particularly in the field of live streaming and how audiences interact with one another. As a student in the MHCI program at CMU, he is taking courses related to user-centered research, as well as working on an independent study project looking into information availability on the popular live streaming platform Twitch.
Bin (XiaoBin) Li: Design Lead
Bin graduated from ArtCenter College of Design in Product Design. In 2016.6–2018.8, he worked as a user experience designer at BloomSky Inc., Burlingame. BloomSky was a startup that was dedicated to the development of IoT weather stations and weather data services to both consumers and enterprise clients. At BloomSky, he led the design of a new toB product line, SPOT. As an MHCI student, he is taking Corporate Startup Lab, and working on the CubeRover project, which aims at creating low-cost, mobile robotic lunar access for companies, governments, universities and non-profits across the world.
Niharika Jayanthi: UX Engineer
Niharika received a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering in 2016 from University of Mumbai. She has three years of industry work experience as a front-end developer at Tata Consultancy Services. As part of a horizontal unit ‘Digital Enterprise System Solutions’, she has worked in multiple domains such as banking, insurance, aerospace, and racing. She is currently a part of the Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction program at CMU, learning courses such as User-Centered Research, Interactive Data Science and Applied Machine Learning.
Meeting numo
Prior to this project, no one in our group had worked in finance. Googling had only gotten us so far, so we were determined to get our initial questions about numo and the card linking space out of the way so we could focus on more discovery-oriented activities during our kickoff. Numo was kind enough to invite us over a week before our kick-off to give us some background to the project.
We came up with a list of questions to ask numo during the meeting based on the prompt and what we had learned from our very preliminary research. These questions asked about topics like the current stage of the project, if any research had been done, if we would have access to any data and what data, etc. During the meeting we went through our questions, skipping some and adding on to others as we learned more from our clients. Ultimately we were able to get a clearer idea of what the goal of this project was, but we were still left with questions about the card linking space. It was time to do some research.
Research, Research, Research!!
Our team did a ton of background research. After our preliminary meeting with the clients, we synthesized our notes and assigned topics to each team member. We focused on the fundamentals of CLO’s, stakeholders, organizations, and competitors in the space and realized that this is super complicated. But, we were excited to take on the challenge!
The main topics we focused on were:
- Cardlytics: the platform that powers CLO campaigns that banks use
- Groupon & Dosh: apps providing B2C CLOs
- Clover: Point of Sales system that many merchants use
- Demographics of people using credit vs. debit cards
- Existing research on metrics around CLOs
- Competitive analysis of CLOs
To effectively explain our research to others, we posted our research slides on our wall for all to see. Then, we each took turns discussing what we learned. We all chimed in with follow up questions that we took note of on post-it notes.
By the end of this background research phase, we all felt excited and knowledgeable enough to go into the kick-off prepared with discussion points and questions.
Kicking off with numo
Before discussing how our kick-off meeting in-depth, here are 5 quick tips about how to have a great kick-off with your client:
#1: Make sure all your team members are aligned on goals
#2: Come prepared with examples so the client understands the activities
#3: Agree as a team which activities could be dropped if other activities are productive and taking more time than originally allocated
#4: Run your activities by people that have been in the industry longer than you have! They’ll be able to predict what will and won’t work.
#5: If you know a certain client(s) will only be available for a portion of the kick-off, plan your agenda to maximize their usefulless to you!
Before planning activities for the kick-off meeting, we made sure our team was aligned on goals and what we wanted to get out of this meeting.
We decided that our main goals of this meeting were to:
- Identify and reach a common understanding of problems in CLO space
- Map target users and create interactions among stakeholders
- Identify pain points of potential users and map ideal states
After a quick icebreaker to get everyone off their feet, we dived straight into our activities.
Our first activity was the Card-Linking Offers Space Activity:
This exercise elicited a ton of conversation that allowed us to define our future plans for research. Our team found it to be extremely useful, and would highly recommend it to other groups as a starting point for a kick-off. In addition, we were lucky to have the CEO of numo in the room during a portion of this exercise. We focused on extracting from what he thought the key problems were and understood his vision for this project.
In addition, to every problem or challenge the client noted, we asked why. This allowed us to delve into the problem, and gain clarity on the issues.
From this exercise, we were able to highlight three main challenges the clients faced:
#1: Tension exists between consumers and merchants because consumers do not receive offers automatically. Instead, they have to click the offer to activate it.
#2: Users are inundated with offers that aren’t relevant to them.
#3: Small merchants are not well represented in CLOs.
Next, we moved into a stakeholder activity. In preparation for this activity, our team came up with stakeholders we believe are involved in the process. We already knew the space was complicated, but we quickly realized that the client felt similarly. Therefore, we mapped out what we could with the client. For any gaps we found, we decided to take those as action items for us to research more later.
We ended our kick-off meeting discussing cadence and next steps. Then, we enjoyed a dinner with our clients at Garbarino’s where we got to know each other on a personal level. We shared our backgrounds, how we got into this area, and what our plans are post-graduation!
Currently, we’re working on synthesizing our kick-off notes and creating a research plan. Overall, the kick-off meeting was a success. Our team feels motivated and ready to take on this challenge!
