Institute for Systems Research
Budgeting Application for Recent Graduates
Duration: 2 months
Team of 6
My role:
Interaction Design, Interviewing, Personas, Involved in Affinity Diagram and Model
What financial information do graduating students look for?
Introduction
The Institute for Systems Research wanted to know:
What financial information do graduating students look for?
To solve this problem, they tasked us with:
Conducting research and creating an interface that integrates machine learning to help graduating students make better financial decisions.
Project Takeaways
By completing this project, I gained valuable insights into the importance of user-centered design in financial applications. By focusing on crafting a seamless user experience, I learned how to prioritize user needs, simplify complex financial concepts, and guide users towards making informed decisions about their budgets. Through interviewing users to learn more about their budgeting and spending habits as well as their behaviors and pain points they face, we discovered that most students wanted more information about how to invest their money once they graduate. Overall, this project reinforced the notion that empathy and an understanding of user behavior are crucial elements in creating effective designs for financial management applications.
Our Research Question:
“How does early financial education (e.g. family or school) affect students’ ability to plan for the future?”
Our group was assigned to study students who were native to the United States. From here, we narrowed our user base to undergraduate students graduating within the next year. We knew that not everyone would want the same information about finance, so we first decided to explore what students already knew.
Interviews
My team and I interviewed 6 participants, 50% Female and 50% Male between the ages of 21 and 22.
We gathered the data from our six interviews and created an affinity diagram to display and analyze it, grouping common responses and themes.
Key Findings
Our Interview Data showed the following:
Trust:
Most people trust advice from those who have the background and experience to back up their claims.
The majority of the participants consult their parents for financial advice
Saving/Spending:
Many participants find it important to save for unexpected situations
Although most participants found it important to save, they also want to enjoy their lives while they’re young
Stressors:
Most of the stressors students face are short-term, including balancing their monthly income and expenses
Many participants were anxious about planning for the future and growing their money by investing
Relationship Model
Based on our interviews, we created a Relationship Model to encompass our participants’ responses. We chose a relationship model because our data showed that our interviewees get most of their knowledge financial from external influences like their family, friends, and professionals.
Personas
We also created two personas based on our participants’ responses. These helped us to keep our audience in mind when designing our final solution.
Market Research
We looked into the top three competitors on the market to understand our unique selling point and see where our product could fill gaps that these products left.
Visioning
Before we developed our prototype, we sketched out some of the ideas we had for the application.
Conceptualization
Our aim through the product concept and prototype was to provide a solution to combine financial knowledge and investing practices into a one-stop platform. We created a flexible resource for students that they know they can trust.
Wall Walk
We displayed our project for the client and the class to get feedback on our work.
What I learned
This project was the first time I was able to use real data that my team and I collected to create a model. With the data we gathered, we compared and contrasted different models to determine which best fit our participants and the story we wanted to tell. This was also my first time working with a largely diverse group where more than 50% of the group was international students. This experience further cemented my belief that more diverse perspectives makes for better design work.
Future Work
If we had more time to work on this project, I would’ve liked to test the prototype with users that fit our population criteria and continue to iterate on the screens based on the feedback I received. I would love to see this app actually be implemented as I feel this is a gap that should be filled in this population and would prove to be useful among users outside of just our target population. We also would’ve liked to conduct more market research on current resources to see where gaps can be filled with our product.