Giving young Canadians the tools they need to take control of their financial wellbeing.
FinWise is an app to get you feeling confident when it comes to financial decisions, as navigating the Financial marketplace can be overwhelming— FinWise will allow you to learn on the go and at your own pace to enhance your financial literacy!
FinWise.
Project Overview
As part of BrainStation’s UX Design Diploma Program, I was tasked with completing a capstone project using the tools and techniques of User Experience Design.
This project was an end-to-end UX design process that involved designing a digital mobile solution for an identified problem space.
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Solo, Academic
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8 Weeks
July 2022- Sept 2022
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UX/UI Designer
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Figma
Invision -
Mobile iOS
The Design Process
For this project, I approached it using the human-centered design process and leveraged a non-linear design-thinking methodology . The goal was to keep users’ wants, pain points and preferences in front of mind at every phase of the process.
Empathize.
Problem Discovery
Many students currently leaving high school — and many adults — have weak financial skills and little knowledge of the financial realities they will face.
Money is the biggest stress in most people’s lives. Much of the stress stems from a lack of understanding, planning and/or reckless behaviour when it comes to financial management.
Many scramble to figure it out, but it often proves to be frustrating finding the time to effectively learn this critically important skill while juggling other responsibilities without overwhelming themselves with the plethora of resources and information at hand.
Financial Worry Causing Canadians to Lose Sleep, Scotiabank poll (CNW Group/Scotiabank)
Secondary Research
Upon identifying the problem space, I conducted secondary research to gain a better understanding of young Canadians (18-34) and their financial literacy.
39%
report that financial stress has led to health issues
60%
report that they don’t feel confident about their finances
32%
report that they are losing sleep over their finances
50%
report taking on debt in order to keep up with their peers
70%
report that they are living paycheque to paycheque
Primary Research
Building from our secondary research findings, I conducted 4 interviews to gain insights about the pain points, current behaviours, and motivations for young Canadians when it comes to their financial habits, and what makes learning about finances so difficult.
Financial jargon is complex and difficult to fully understand, . This has had the effect of intimidating many young Canadians and preventing them from asking critical questions about their financial well-being.
In addition to the lack of financial education provided by the BC education curriculum. Families choosing to keep their loved ones in the dark on topics around finance keeps them from making smart money decisions later on
An abundance of resources do exist but finding the time to decipher, evaluate, and absorb topics from multiple resources is tremendously difficult.
It’s Intimidating
Lack of Guidance
Dispersed Information
“How might we…support and educate Canadians under 35 by increasing their financial literacy in order to reduce stress so that they can confidently make financial decisions?”
Define.
Persona
After thoroughly synthesizing my findings from user interviews and secondary research, I defined my persona— I’d like to introduce you to Susan.
Personas are an extremely valuable UX tool, allowing me to better understand my target audience and make design decisions accordingly. Guiding the ideation process and making sure to be mindful by keeping the real user at the heart of every-step of the process.
Experience Mapping
To analyze the emotional experience of the Persona, the following Experience Map flags difficult, frustrating, and overwhelming it is for “Susan” to increase her financial literacy is online with the plethora of resources available online.
This Experience Map of her journey helped me illustrate her experience and visualize what she was going through in order to achieve her goal. This helped me further identify where opportunities for a digital solution are possible.
Ideate.
User Stories & Epics
User stories help us define and design features that will address our users needs— Taking an agile approach with user stories help shift the focus to functionality through the perspective of the user.
After writing over 30 User Stories and grouping them into 4 Epics, I chose the core Epic of Overwhelmed & Intimidated to focus on as it addressed Susan’s biggest struggle during her journey of trying to learn online.
Task Flow
Building upon our core epic of overwhelmed & intimidated, user stories, experience map, and persona— I created a task flow that depicts the journey our user “Susan” will take with FinWise. In this setting, Susan wants to learn on the go and at her own pace in which she opens up the app our her commute home from work to complete the last activity in module 2 that she left to complete from the night before!
Prototype.
UI Inspiration Board
I put together a UI board to gain inspiration for various elements of my application.
Taking inspiration from what is out there, what works, and what is current
Utilizing this UI board will give us and idea of how and where to start sketching out our Task Flow
Sketches: Exploratory + Solution
Upon establishing a clear task flow, it was time to create exploratory and solution sketches. I created variations of different screens to get my ideas on paper to help guide my wire-framing process.
Sketching
Wireframes
Taking inspiration from my various concept sketches, I then turned them into wireframes
Wireframes serve multiple purposes by helping to connect the information architecture to its visual design by showing paths between pages.
Initial Prototype
I used the solution sketches and greyscale wireframe to develop an interactive greyscale prototype using Figma.
Test.
User Testing Highlights
The next step was creating a test plan that allows participants to explore their journey through the application without biases or preconceptions.
2 rounds of online user testing were conducted, iterations were made after each round— obtaining feedback from 5 different individual users for each round. These test sessions allowed me to get real-time feedback while the users completed the necessary tasks and subtasks developed from the taskflow.
When the testing had been completed I compiled the user insights onto a Design Prioritization Matrix based on their level of value to the user and the level of effort required to fix. This lead me to my next iteration of my prototype with the proposed changes.
User Testing Results from Round 1
According to user feedback from the first round of user testing , most opportunities of improvement lies in Task 3.
User Testing Results from Round 2
Our second round of usability testing showed us the design intervention after round 1 resulted in an incredible improvement.
Implement.
Moodboard
Before creating the moodboard, I set the themes on what I want the users to feel using my application.
A visual identity serves as the representation of the brand and its services— to communicate the impression we want to convey Defining our brand with a colour palette, typography, and design of a word-mark, in addition to illustrations and photography will help establish a brand within our application
Brand Identity
Through this process of finding aspirations that align with the values of Finwise — we found that the color Blue expresses trust, reliability and dependability.
This cool calming color helps build customer loyalty, acts as a tension reducer, and invokes a friendly calming environment.
This harmonious feeling is conductive to a comfortable and positive learning environment,
Wordmark
Our goal for our wordmark was to represent reliability, professionalism, and strength.
As a Fintech application, we believe that our users look for a combination of welcoming and strength when it comes to their finances
Font: Libre Caslon Text
Weight: Regular
Logo & Icon
Upon multiple iterations and concepts, I ultimately decided on the name ‘FinWise.’ as it represents itself to users exactly as it is perceived: a financial wisdom application.
The application icon was designed with the ideas of strength, reliability, and professionalism in mind— while maintaining the tension reducing trustworthy shade of blue.
Hi-Fidelity Prototype
The High Fidelity Prototype is created after 2 rounds of user testing and iterations
Marketing Site
Upon the completion of my Hi-fidelity prototype and having an established brand, I made a marketing website to entice users to download the app.
The marketing site includes testimonials to build trust with the users as well as important features that would be of value to the users.
I made the website responsive for mobile so it could be viewed from either a desktop or a mobile device.
Alternative Platform - Apple watch
FinWise is meant to allow you to learn on the go and at your own pace— our previous research has shown that young Canadians have a-lot on their plate and forget to allocate the time to learning.
I thought it was fitting to utilize the apple watch notification function to give our persona ‘Susan” a friendly a reminder on how close she is to completing her learning module.
Looking into the Future
Use FineWise assist the transition for immigrants coming to Canada to learn the ways of a new financial systems they may not have experience with.
Further testing will also be required to enhance functionality.
