Challenge
Design a financial planning app and tool to help users set up their financial goals, the associated costs, and provide solutions to help learn about and achieve short and long term financial goals.
My Role
UX Lead Designer, UX/UI Strategy, Design Systems alignment for development handoff.
Process
RESEARCH: We conducted Research completing stakeholder interviews, gathered market research, conducted user interviews and completed competitive analysis in the marketplace.
IDEATION: Brainstorming sessions, participatory workshops and storyboarding to organize the team goals.
DESIGN: Sitemap iterations, paper prototyping, wire-framing, higher fidelity interactive click prototypes in InVision for testing.
USER TESTING: Conducted remote unmoderated usability testing regularly, and later in project lab moderated usability testing.
Ideation & whiteboard sessions to gather ideas based on goals
I lead many ideation and whiteboard sessions with marketing and product owners to formulate strategies to approach a complex project.
Early wires coming together after discovery
Our challenge was to create a simple goal planning experience that was fun and able to be completed without an advisor. Target audience was lower to medium financial literacy between the ages of 35-50.
After basic questions were answered quickly, I wanted to visualize the data return in a fun way, maybe a timeline would help visually map and prioritize the goals inputed data.
Early high-fidelity prototypes for user testing
I created high fidelity prototypes to test concepts with potential targeted audiences using usertesting.com. Testing showed that in order to be meaningful, the experience was getting fairly long, and users wanted it to be quicker to complete and get customized insights for their time spent.
Conducted remote unmoderated usability testing
I helped create participant screener questions and review testing videos in various stages using usability.com. A great quick way to get quick directional feedback on basic understanding of various tool stages.
Test and Learn
I conducted lab based moderated user testing with participants. It was great to use our new testing facility to dig into user expectations with the experience. I helped conduct interviews, and use affinity mapping to gather notes for consolidated feedback.
The biggest success was getting product, marketing and development teams on board with the power of testing and teaching them the methodology. We learned from every round of tests and implemented them in our next designs.
Results
Final app and platform designs for development, launched in Q3/2018.
Continuous planning improvements were projected for 2019 based on feedback from early users. Adding more robust financial solutions after planning and learning based activities in the future will broaden the platform experience in the future.
