Incentives —A UX/LMS Case Study
Introduction
College can be busy; between classes, homework, looking for jobs, and saving some time to socialize. Add stressing out about personal finances into that mix and 24 hours a day is simply not enough. Financial literacy is imperative to prepare for the future, and college students tend to ignore this responsibility until it’s too late. Rent is due, loans are piling up, and students just lack the knowledge of how to successfully manage their money.
Currently, students typically learn about finances through parents, friends, or the first link they find on Google. Not everyone has access to these resources, or they may not be receiving the advice they really need to succeed. But the biggest thing that these options lack is a way of practicing good financial habits before dealing with them in real life.
As students ourselves, we’ve seen first hand how difficult it can be to find time out of our busy days to learn about something that can be so complicated, especially when it’s not directly connected to our degree. Taking a basic financial planning class has been successful for the small number of students who have the time in their schedule to take one, but oftentimes they forget what they learned if they don’t keep up the good habits. Additionally, this method of learning through rigid tests and assignments doesn’t always work. Students learn in so many different ways and enjoy the option of making their own schedule and practicing skills on their own time.
We thought about ways we could solve this problem using our skills in UX/UI design. After lots of ideas and brainstorming, our solution was to design a course in financial literacy that allows students to learn through their own schedule and motivates students by offering prizes after the completion of each weeks’ lesson. By doing this project as a pair, we learned a lot about collaborative design, working as a team, instructional design, and more.
Our Project
We designed Incentives, a course on personal finance designed to be easy to navigate, informative, fun, and stress-free. It’s the perfect way for students to learn about savings, budgeting, paying back student loans, financial planning for the future, and so much more. We wanted the course to be accessible for students on the go, so we designed it to be used on both desktop and mobile.
Our main goal for the app was to make learning about finances as simple and approachable as possible. To do this, we needed to make the course both flexible and exciting. One way we achieved this goal was by designing our Learning Management System (LMS) in a way that allows users to create their own schedule and timeline of assignments. This allows students to eliminate stress and make the learning experience enjoyable.
To solve the lack of motivation problem that often comes with learning about something that can be so complicated, Incentives has a system of rewards that students earn after completing lessons. These rewards, called badges, are collected along the way and make the course similar to a game. Users can connect their Incentives profile to their college or university in order to receive badges that can be redeemed at local coffee shops or stores.
Overall, Incentives was created to appeal to college students and give them a stress-free way to learn about finances; allowing them to learn and practice valuable skills that they will carry through their adult life. By having features like customizable schedules and collectible rewards, Incentives stands out in the world of instructional design.
Research
Initial Research
In order to start our research for this project, we needed to learn about what already exists, along with how students currently handle their finances. To do this, we made a plan to do three types of design research: focus groups, surveys, and unstructured interviews. Conducting a range of different research methods, ensuring that all areas of instructional design and finance would be covered.
Focus Group
To begin, we decided to organize a focus group consisting of college students attending a range of universities. By doing this method of research, we were able to let the participants guide the direction of the discussion and reveal things about finance that we hadn’t yet thought about.
Our questions included stressors about finance, current methods of learning, what is already known, and what students need to know more about. In general, our focus group showed us that students want to learn about budgeting, savings, and taxes because these areas are both the most important and most confusing.
Surveys
The next part of our research phase was to conduct two surveys. We knew we needed a way to collect a lot of information from a wide variety of college students quickly, so surveys were the perfect option.
The first survey we sent out was to find out what courses or information is offered for students currently, and how students want to learn. From this survey, we discovered that over 80% of students had not learned about finance in high school, and 60% had not learned about finance in college. From the students who had taken classes in the past, only 30% said that the information was useful. Clearly, this is a big problem; and one we knew we could find a solution for. We also found out that an overwhelming majority of students would feel motivated to complete a course on their own without the stress of excessive tests and assignments.
Next, we conducted a short survey to find out what rewards would help further incentivize students to complete the course. We sent this survey to students attending Temple University which allowed us to narrow down specific, local rewards that could correlate to other colleges. We decided which rewards we would use for our badges based on the highest number of votes.
Interviews
Our last method of research was conducting unstructured interviews. With the help of our professor Abby Guido, we connected with 3 experts in the field of instructional design and learning: Carly Papenberg, Director of Instructional Design at the Fox School of Business; Jessica McDermott, Director of Assessment and Adaptive Learning at Discovery Education; and Emtinan Alqurashi, Assistant Director of Educational Technology, Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Temple University.
Before the interviews, we prepared topics we wanted to cover along with some open-ended questions that would help guide our discussion. We asked questions pertaining to course structure, what should be avoided, asynchronous courses, LMS interface design, and how to keep students on track. The information we gathered from these interviews was incredibly impactful in how we organized information into our final LMS design. We went from knowing very little about instructional design (just our personal experiences with Canvas and Blackboard) to knowing details down to how long video assignments should be to keep students engaged. We thoroughly enjoyed our discussions with these experts, and with their knowledge and our skills in graphic design, we were able to create an LMS that solved many of the issues existing in current systems.
User Persona
Based on our focus groups, we created a user persona. These focus groups included members of our target audience who ranged from recent high school graduates to college seniors. Our user persona helped us to visualize what problems we need to solve and the goals we will help our users to achieve.
The Design Process
Card Sorting & Prototypes
Using the information we learned through our focus groups, surveys, and interviews, we were ready to start building our prototype. Since we completed this project as a team during the pandemic, we used Miro to help us with the design process. First, we brainstormed all of the elements Incentives would need. Based on the advice from our interviews, it was clear that all of the information needed to be easy to find; whether that was the course overview, grades, or a certain assignment. Participants placed post-it notes in the category they thought the features belonged in, which helped us define the most logical spot for all students.
From this point, we crafted a user journey as well as a user flow. Our user journey was a draft of how a student would complete an assignment. By writing out each step the user would have to take, we made sure that the student would complete the task in the minimum amount of clicks.
Next, we moved on to a more in-depth user flow. This flow chart informed all of the paths the user could take to complete different tasks throughout Incentives. Our main goal was that students won’t struggle to find their way around, so we made sure that the most important information was easily available.
After working on our user flow, we were able to start sketching out our paper prototype. We roughly designed the blueprint for each screen a user would encounter, moving elements around along the way. Many of the decisions we made were informed by our interviews; including having the main homepage be a calendar where students would find all upcoming assignments without having to navigate through a million different pages.
Lastly, we moved the paper prototype over to the digital space and started wireframing. This process allowed us to clean up our existing prototype, and add anything that was missing. It also gave us a better understanding of the hierarchy and visuals for each screen.
Branding
To start the visual components of our brand, we first researched competitor logos using Logo Lounge to see what was working and what wasn’t. We noticed that many of the competitors used blue in their educational logos, and of course green in logos relating to finance. The image within type logos worked best in most cases because they were fun, but the brand name was the top priority.
Now that we had done logo research, we moved on to sketching our Incentives logo. Our main goal was that we wanted the logo to be both playful and smart. We went through many ideas in our sketches but ended up making the “c” in incentives into a coin while keeping the rest of the type simple and bold. The most challenging part of the logo process was deciding what style worked best for the coin, and we ended up with a friendly, stylized coin that sets the tone for the rest of the brand. Lastly, we added a fun tagline to further inform the viewer of what Incentives is all about.
Interface
The interface for Incentives was heavily informed by the knowledge we gained from our interviews. We wanted to address many of the problems that currently exist in many LMS. To do this, we made sure that the interface was customizable, easy to navigate, and stress-free. Our dashboard is where the user can see all of their assignments in one place and sort by upcoming, all, or today only. Additionally, we wanted to make sure users could manage the course load on their own time. We included the ability to move around assignments on the days students plan to complete them, limiting unnecessary stress while keeping the user organized.
Before designing, we thought about whether or not Incentives should be available on both desktop and mobile. We thought about the existing problems with LMS, and one of the biggest we’ve both experienced first hand is that the mobile versions are not very user friendly. They’re usually clunky, confusing, and have more limitations than desktop versions. So, we decided to fix these issues when it came to Incentives. We created a mobile version that allows students to take the course on the go, without losing any of the features of the desktop interface. Students can easily take their phones out, track their monthly spending, or watch a quick video assignment.
One of the key features of Incentives is the “incentives” themselves. We designed a badge system that students receive after completing each week of lessons. Using the responses from our survey, we chose four rewards Temple University students would want to receive most: a free hoodie, free coffee, free pizza. The final badge, registering for classes a day early, is given at the end of the course and serves as a motivator for completing Incentives.
To redeem the badges, students can open the Incentives app and view them right on their phone. They’ll be able to scan them at each location to get their free item. Additionally, students at other Universities and Colleges have the ability to choose their school when they sign up and receive corresponding badges for local coffee shops or pizza restaurants.
Application of the Brand
To complete the brand, we created some additional assets to promote Incentives. We designed an Instagram page that promotes our course and shares educational financial tips through the brands simple, friendly look.
Additionally, we created a few videos that further extend the brand. One is an example of a video assignment, and the other is a walkthrough that takes the user through the Incentives app. Our fun illustration style easily educates students on financial skills like depositing a check by making a complex topic seem simple. We also created a design system that explains all of the specifics of our logo, colors, and typography.
Conclusion
Today, so many students are tasked with learning about finances on their own. We solved this problem by creating Incentives, a course in financial literacy that allows students to learn through their own schedule and motivates students by offering prizes after the completion of each weeks’ lesson.
Working as a team of two during the pandemic made the design process a completely different experience than anything we’ve done before. Instead of working side by side, looking off each other’s screens during class, we were a few miles away sharing our screens on Zoom. Even with these limitations in place, we knew that we could combine our skills to help students become financially literate and address the flaws in Learning Management Systems. Communication was key; the two of us spent our time working in a collaborative XD file, texting gifs and screenshots back and forth for feedback and sharing a huge Google Drive with all of our files organized in one place. Looking back, we not only grew closer as designers but also learned more than we would have in person; from the advice we received in our Interviews, to how to work remotely as a team and create a project we’re incredibly proud of.
Credits:
Designers: Amanda Andreucci & Alli Mandel
Professor: Abby Guido
Check out the project on Behance!
