Kicking it Off
We are team Treecko, a student capstone project group from the MHCI program at Carnegie Mellon University. We are partnered with Troutwood to find opportunities that empower individuals with tools and knowledge to plan and take control of their financial future.
Understanding money and managing finances is no easy feat. From individuals to organizations, we are all tasked to deal with our finances at some point in our lives. While managing money is a significant skill to master, it is definitely something that is often very daunting, stressful and inaccessible to many. We, the MHCI capstone team (team Treecko!) are tasked with finding opportunities and designing pathways that make financial education easy, safe and secure. We envision a future where this knowledge is accessible to anyone — for high school students, senior executives and professionals, for people of any income, for people of all ages and backgrounds.
While this journey isn’t easy, Treecko x Troutwood is ready for it!
Questioning Everything
One of our first steps as a team was to really understand our project space, our partners and their goals for the fintech/ed-tech space. We did this by mapping out our key questions while we read more about the project brief. Once we did that, we clustered them into different groups. As we did this activity, we better understood some of the common themes and areas that emerged.
Here are some of the key questions that we had:
- How does financial planning empower individuals?
- Why does the company focus on providing conflict-free financial planning? What does that look like?
- Who are we impacting through this work?
- What are people using to plan their finances currently? What challenges do they face?
Research, research, research!
Before we could dive into providing insights and opportunities, we wanted to synthesize our thoughts with the information Troutwood provided to us. At this point in time, we really just wanted to think broadly about the problem space and understand the company.
We started our background research in financial planning through many different approaches — sifting through literature reviews, talking to our cohort about budgeting, scheduling calls with financial advisors and early career professionals… or even just googling financial terms!
We also digested the information we had on Troutwood’s company and products by testing out their applications and watching their publicly accessible videos to learn more about their perspective.
Meeting the Troutwood Team
We finally reached kickoff day! This kickoff meeting was our first interaction with the Troutwood team. After we completed introductions and ice breakers we moved on to our workshop activity. The main objective of our workshop activity was to gain insights for some of the big questions that we had from Troutwood.
For the workshop activity, we utilized Artefact’s Tarot Cards of Tech. We used these tarot cards to think about what the unintended consequences or opportunities for positive change this project can create. It was really insightful to use this activity as a way to put humanity-centered design at the center of our discussions, helping all of us think bigger picture and longer term about the products we create and their effect on the world.
What’s Next?
Now that we have done some preliminary research and gathered perspectives from the team at Troutwood, we plan to synthesize the information we received. The activities we conducted in the last 2 weeks prompted us to dive deeper into our research, and we are excited to reach out to users to learn from their perspectives as well — through direct channels such as interviews and discussions, as well as more indirect methods such as walking through the app with them and gathering feedback. More on that soon!
Also, here’s our first team photo :P
That’s all for now. Catch you on the next update in this series!
The work and knowledge gained from this project are only intended to be applicable to the company and context involved and there is no suggestion or indication that it may be useful or applicable to others. This project was conducted for educational purposes and is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge.
