Making Cents of Ambiguity
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.
It’s Sprint 2 and we’re picking up momentum! The dust is thick, the ambiguity is high, and the excitement is bursting at the seams. We’ve traded in our tentative tiptoeing for a full-on sprint headfirst into the financial district. So buckle up, grab your favorite sharpies and post-it notes, and let’s dive headfirst into the madness that is Sprint 2.
Following our kickoff with the Troutwood team, we spent time debriefing and charting a way forward. So much to unpack, so many directions to move in, so many questions. To begin with, we noted our largest unanswered questions and the research methods we can employ to unlock the answers.
We broke our initial research activities into three tracks:
- Exploratory research into the world of financial planning through interviews, secondary research, and studying the competitive landscape
- Information gathering from the client through product demos with the Troutwood team and running stakeholder interviews
- Evaluative research into Troutwood’s current user experience through usability tests with new users and surveying existing users
Listening and learning
Starting with a broad and vague brief can make it challenging to identify the problem areas that need to be addressed. So where do you begin? We began with a wide-ranging approach aimed at building a shared understanding of how people think about finance world among team members. We started interviewing the students, professionals, and financial advisors to better understand the American personal finance landscape and attitudes around money.
Personal finance is a complex and multifaceted topic that is highly influenced by a variety of factors, including individuals’ backgrounds, emotions, and experiences. People’s attitudes towards money can be shaped by their upbringing, cultural background, and personal experiences, leading to a wide range of different perspectives and approaches to managing finances. Additionally, emotions such as fear, anxiety, and excitement can play a significant role in decision-making related to personal finance. It is important to recognize these factors when conducting research or providing advice related to personal finance, as they can have a significant impact on individuals’ financial behavior and outcomes.
Understanding the market landscape
We also started doing competitor research to gain insights into the market, and identify trends and best practices. Troutwood has a host of services offered in the app and their customers lie in both the consumer and enterprise side. This means our net is cast wide right now: financial advice, investment tracking, budgeting, or expense tracking. By analyzing the companies and the customer segments they cater to, we can better understand where Troutwood’s unique value proposition can lie. It’s also interesting to understand the psychology behind the different schools of thought that can exist to accomplish the same goal. For example, to budget my finances, I could employ products that use a zero-based budgeting system, value-based budgeting, and envelope budgeting amongst many other methods.
Delving deeper into personal finance, we are beginning to realize the importance of behavioral science in building healthy financial habits. This is taking us into new product territories, not necessarily just fintech products, where behavior change and habit formation are crucial for the user and product’s success. More on this in the future.
Collaboration and alignment with our partners
We’re no experts in financial planning (well, not yet). We can’t pretend to walk into a room with all the answers. It’s of utmost importance that we understand the complete context and background of our partners at Troutwood to understand their ‘why.’
So we’ve been actively engaging with the team through a series of 1:1 stakeholder interviews to gain a better understanding of their context and fill any gaps in our knowledge. As UX practitioners, we focus on users and their needs but stakeholder interviews help us identify business objectives and success metrics. Matching the two successfully is key to finding product-market fit. Stakeholder interviews have been a useful tool in alignment, saving time and getting us up to speed with the company’s history of tried solutions. It’s valuable to understand the perspectives and priorities of stakeholders from design, product, and engineering.
During these interviews, we use collaborative visual frameworks such as a business model canvas or a brand association map. We’re increasingly finding the immense value of using visual frameworks to effectively gather information. Prior to faculty or client engagement, we proactively think if there is a framework that would be best suited to uncover insights and engage the participants, rather than relying solely on a standard set of questions.
Usability testing to discover opportunities for improvement
In order to better understand users’ first impressions of the Troutwood App, we began to run usability tests via a think-aloud protocol. We had participants complete a financial plan (Troutwood’s central feature) and share what thoughts they had about the app as a whole, as well as provide feedback on the flow of the app. We found that participants appreciated the clean and modern interface, but felt that the home screen was confusing and wordy. When it came time to create a financial plan, we had participants who ranged from extremely practical to unattainably aspirational, like wanting to become a billionaire in 10 years on a 60k/year salary (the latter participant was discouraged upon discovering that their plan had a 0% likelihood). Beyond elucidating minuscule flaws within the app, our usability test pointed out various larger issues such as the fact that users felt like there lacked a “call to action” that allowed participants to take the next step in taking control of their finances once a financial plan was made.
Looking Ahead
The initial stages of a project like this are often clouded in ambiguity, making it clear why the MHCI program places such emphasis on an individual’s ability to navigate ambiguity. A crucial skill in this phase is the ability to sequence research methods effectively to uncover insights, and understand how the results of one method inform the strategy for the next.
In a world of instant gratification, we face the challenge of fostering healthy engagement with a service that offers lasting financial benefits. To accomplish this, we must continue to explore how people approach personal finance and pursue this endeavor with unrelenting curiosity. Stay tuned for more updates
