Open to Opportunities
Treecko is the project name for our capstone group at the MHCI program at Carnegie Mellon University. We are masters students partnered with Troutwood, a financial services company, with a mission to empower individuals with the tools and knowledge to plan and take control of their financial future.
What we don’t know
Since the beginning of our partnership with Troutwood, we’ve been throwing ourselves into primary and secondary research. By this point we’ve gathered information from literature reviews, conducting usability tests, and interviews with multiple stakeholders: students, young and mid-career adults who have jobs and financial experts in an effort to broaden our perspectives. It was time for us to put our money where our mouth was and turn ambiguity into ideation.
What could be
We began this sprint by listing out all the problems we identified through our research, combining data points together in order to create new themes. This process led us to creating a user journey map — a visual representation of our user’s experience. What is financial planning like from the customers perspective? That was a big question!
Our team walked the wall and synthesized our data, which led us to reframe our design problem and prioritize our target users. Through how might we statements we found this dichotomy extremely interesting and it led us to reframe the problem: Design a goal-setting and behavior change system for users that will create positive financial habits.
Focusing on a user group
Troutwood’s goal is for users to own their financial future and currently has a broad user base. Due to the variety of people the company is problem solving for, we’ve identified a core group of users we believe we can have a great impact with**, college students in their final year at the cusp of beginning their careers.** This is a pivotal moment for them as they transition into “adulthood,” and begin to make “real money.” We’ve identified this transitional time as a trigger point for young adults to begin planning for their financial future. They are a user group whose problems are high impact to solve and fit well with Troutwood’s mission and existing resources.
Learnings from our Need-Finding Activity
What we understood about financial plans came from financial advisors and experienced professionals. The team realized that college students’ perceptions and mental models of how to make plans could drastically vary. We took a step back and asked college students what a financial plan meant to them.
In this activity we recruited 3 participants, graduating seniors, to make a financial plan to set them up for success at the start of their full-time careers. We had them think-aloud with the designer, who acted in the role of a financial advisor. P1 and P2 have business backgrounds and were able to build a detailed plan, touching upon a variety of aspects in financial planning: retirement, investment, savings, big life events, etc., while articulating their thought process. P3 had difficulties thinking beyond budgeting and cash flow. When pushed to provide context and elaborate on details, she frequently sought advice, assurance, and guidance from the ‘financial advisor.’ P3’s experience is a glimpse of an uneasy journey that less financially literate students go through as they enter the workplace. From this exercise we want to explore ways to develop a financial planning flow that is intuitive and inclusive.
We also asked participants’ about their broader life goals in order to understand what motivations are driving their financial planning behavior. While participants who delivered thorough plans were able to firmly articulate their long-term goals and convert more abstract goals into a sequence of activity-based financial objectives, participants who struggled to make a full plan had difficulties in translating their life desires into specific financial milestones. Potential reasons are knowledge gaps and psychological barriers. It remains a pressing challenge for us to design techniques that will help students define financial goals as abstract form to help their future self and to help bridge their knowledge gap of personal finance in an engaging way.
Who wants money?
There’s a saying, “Money doesn’t buy happiness.” While money may not “buy happiness,” it does make life easier and bring security to one’s life. Whether it’s being able to buy eggs without balking at the price or not counting pennies to fill the car up with gas, money is what people need to be financially independent, especially when it comes to retiring.
Money is such a personal and emotional topic. It has the ability to impact people’s lifestyle, stress, mental health, and relationships. For some, there is a feeling of fear, frustration and bitterness over a lack of money. For others, there are minimal concerns and they are working towards financial independence.
When we think about the impact we want our project with Troutwood to have, we need to engage and motivate users to continuously think about money as an abstract form, not just cash currency. In order to do so we’re asking ourselves, how can we cause behavior change, establish and meet financial goals?
Highlights from our interview with psychology expert Professor Geoff Kaufman, included learning about persuasive design techniques such as utilizing self-continuity, self-affirmation and nudging to facilitate behavior change. With these learnings, we developed low-fi sketches of all the potential widgets that could appear on a financial planning application.
Next Steps:
Questions we have moving forward:
For our next sprint we’ve identified these points that we want to get answers for. In an effort to help students overcome the mental hurdle we are asking ourselves the following questions:
- What are the different archetypes of college students to consider? What pain points do these different users have and how can we solve these problems for them?
- What does behavioral change mean in terms of applications like? How can we tweak motivational approaches to work for financial literacy?
- Collage your own financial app — participatory design: What does a college student’s ideal financial planning application look like? What are their priorities? This generative activity will engage research participants to design their own financial planning application through collaging components on a “screen.”
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.
