Putting Ourselves Out There
Welcome back to Treecko’s research journey! As we reach the end of the fourth sprint of our capstone project, we narrowed in on two big tasks for us to focus on — one is to make sense of our existing research by generating insights and hypotheses, and the other is to validate these hypotheses with a larger college student demographic.
Making it make sense
Until now, our research focused on gathering as much data as possible — in the form of interviews with students, expert interviews, usability tests, literature reviews, competitive analysis, research-through-design activities… (I know, it’s a lot!). So we decided it was time to hit the brakes, just for a little while. We needed to know if all of this effort was pointing us in a particular direction. We threw in all this data together and identified recurring themes, after which we generated our insights and hypotheses as a team.
Here’s what we think -
- Lack of accessibility and complexity of financial information are driving factors for low financial literacy among college students
- Emotions, perceptions, and motivation are deeply personal and play into the psychology of college students and their environment
- Short-term and long-term financial goals are either clearly defined or fuzzy — it really depends from person to person
So you now know this we what we hypothesize, but how do we validate this? Is this what college students actually want?
More research!
That’s right — we are learning that research isn’t linear — it is messy, it is chaotic, it has its highs and its lows. It is also cyclical. Taking a step back and looking at our past several sprints of interviewing college students, we recognized that our existing interviews were over-indexed in students of privilege. Many students shared that their tuition and living expenses were paid for by their parents, making financial planning and budgeting a much lower priority compared with all the other commitments they had. The city we were interviewing students in, Pittsburgh, has a large number of private universities, potentially biasing our interview findings. What about students who aren’t financially stable? Or students who are working multiple part-time jobs to pay for their university tuition? What are their thoughts on financial planning, budgeting, and investing? Aren’t these populations just as (if not more) important for the work we are trying to do?
Getting Out There
We learned that while it's important to dive deep into research to generate insights, it is also important to go broad and learn from as many different experiences and perspectives as we possibly can. We needed to do more research — and more importantly — get out of our current research space. A spontaneous decision was made to visit the Allegheny Community College in Pittsburgh. Was it a super organized trip? Probably not. Was it worth it? Yes. Did we learn something new? Yes, a hundred percent.
Getting Really Out There
After learning so much at the Allegheny Community College, we decided that we wanted to get really out there and visit several colleges in Cleveland, Ohio, as a way to be exposed to even more perspectives (and make a fun team trip out of it). We were faced with unexpected challenges but also got the chance to do a new activity with students.
Drawing Insights + Next Steps
Because of how many few things we’ve been learning and the new perspectives we are gathering, our team wants to commit ourselves to take the next week to engage in thorough synthesis across various sources. We’re hoping to connect the most recent interviews with the ones we’ve been doing in prior sprints as well as utilize literature reviews to draw meaningful insights and create new hypotheses.
The time this semester has flown by, and we are rapidly approaching our fifth and final sprint of the spring semester — which means it is time to start ideating and testing those hypotheses! As a team of 5 product designers, we’re on the edge of our seats to hop on Figma and start designing. We hope to create at least one prototype by the end of the semester so we have something to test our hypotheses with. We’re so excited to see where the rest of the semester takes us, and what form our prototype will take.
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.
