Helping young adults make informed and effective financial decisions
Passion Project | UX Design, UI and Visual Design, Illustrations
Problem
Young adults feel overwhelmed with learning about personal finance management
Solution
A mobile app that enables gamified, bite-sized lessons that align with learning goals
Role
UX and UI Design, Illustrations
Background
My interest in personal finance grew during my college years. Soon I realized, there was so much more to planning your finances that I never learned at school. After asking around, I discovered that many young adults faced the same problems while learning about personal finances.
Based on my personal experience, I took this up as a passion project to make learning personal financial management easy for young adults.
Problem Discovery
Having an overview of the current market was important to understand the scope of the problem and validate my initial assumptions. I found significant and relevant statistical data that supported my case.
Four of five adults say they were never given the opportunity to learn about personal finance
70% of young adults say they know that someday they need to be more financially secure; they just don't know how to get there.
70% of young adults are stressed and anxious about saving for retirement
22% of young adults feel overwhelmed about their finances
User Research
Interviewing young adults and indulging in open-ended discussions about their financial journeys, the following were the key pain points that emerged:
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Feeling overwhelmed because of the vastness of information available
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Not knowing where to start or what is relevant to them
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Easily lose motivation while self-learning
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Not feeling confident that they will retain what they have learned
Goals
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Want to learn about the basics of money
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Only want to learn what is currently useful to them
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Want to make informed and responsible decisions
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Want to learn about the latest trends/changes in the financial field
Frustrations
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Feel overwhelmed with the pool of information online
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Confusion around where to begin and not finding relevant information
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Difficult to keep up to date latest developments
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Find technical words and jargon difficult to understand
Motivations
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Aspire for a financially secure future
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Want to invest wisely
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Want to make better decisions about their finances
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Want to save up for expenses and be independent
Needs
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Want guidance with where to start
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Want to learn from historically successful examples
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Want the content to be easily understandable
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Easy to understand, not very time-consuming, relevant information
Problem Statement
How might we engage 18 to 30-year-olds in learning about personal finance management so that they can make informed and effective financial decisions in their future?
Design Opportunities
How might we make learning about finances fun and appealing for young adults?
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By providing bite-sized lessons that are easy to understand, without technical jargon
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Having a mix of both reading material and video lectures to make learning less monotonous
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Gamification of their progress for active and sustained engagement
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Introducing the idea of personal character that grows as the user learns more
How might we provide young adults with relevant information that aligns with their present learning goals?
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Identifying current priorities by asking personalized questions
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Just-in-time learning
How might we boost the learners' confidence?
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Short summarization after completing every course
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Short quizzes during and after every lesson
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Open-ended questions about finances and weighing in experts' opinions on those
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Learning from real-life case studies and their successes and failures
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Achievements and progress tracker to encourage learning
App Architecture
Exploratory Wireframes
Solution
Gamified Approach to Learning
Meet
Finn
Your little learning companion.
The more you learn, the more it blooms.
Finn is excited about your financial growth and blooms with little coins as you learn and complete more lessons in the app.
This little plant character essentially acts as a visual progress tracker for the user. It adds incentive of engaging more with the app and completing more lessons. From a product point of view, it increases the chances of sustained engagement and active participation from the user.
Learn
Track your learning goals
Set your own daily goals to stay on track and continue learning your ongoing lessons.
Learn
Track your learning goals
Set your own daily goals to stay on track and continue learning your ongoing lessons.
Learn
Go through flashcards in every lesson and bookmark them to revisit later
Easily navigate between short flashcards in each lesson and bookmark them to save them in your library.
Browse
Take the quiz to build your personal bundle or browse through the courses
Build a personalized course based on your learning goals or search any topic
Browse
A quick peek into the course before starting
Get to know more about the course, number of lessons, difficulty level, and approximate learning time before committing to it
My Profile
Achievements to track your progress
Achievements and visual progress tracker to stay motivated
Reflections
Being passionate about this topic, this was a fun project to work on. I was able to learn more about gamification and how products use it to engage users. Moving forward, I want to get user feedback on my high-fidelity prototypes and get insights to improve the experience.
If I had more time...
It would have been interesting to work on how could I actually take this product to market. I would have worked on the business goals and defined the success metrics for this product. I would have come up with a product strategy and prioritized the next set of features for different product milestones. Thinking about answers to the following questions would have been very interesting -
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What should be the line of thought for onboarding more users?
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What features should be launched if the product reached thousands of users?