Demystifying financial literacy via digital banking
🔗 View Interactive PrototypeInteraction Design, Prototyping, User Testing
What's the problem?
A lack of financial literacy skills can decrease your overall standard of living and well-being due to making poor financial decisions.
Australian Gen Zs aged between 15 to 24 had the biggest decline in financial literacy of all age groups, and 90% of them experienced some sort of financial hardship in 2022 (Walsh et al., 2022).
Current financial education methods are either ineffective or under-utilised. Regardless, young adults are ill prepared with sufficient financial knowledge for adulthood.
Why is this the case when we are living in the age of information?
❓ Why did we choose this problem?
When people imagine a healthy lifestyle, they typically think about exercising regularly, sleeping properly and eating a well-balanced diet.
Although these are great habits that are regularly encouraged by society, we realised that what is less commonly talked about, is how good financial habits are essential to our wellbeing.
Our Solution
All-in-one digital banking
PockEd – a digital banking platform that is both practical and educational. Our solution includes standard banking features such as budgeting, as well as novel ones such as financial literacy education and shared saving goals with peers.
Digestible financial education
Guided learning modules are both fundamental (spending, saving, budgeting, saving) as well as specific to each individual's lifestyle needs (moving out for the first time, buying your first home). Each topic contains clear actionable steps that guide the user for success.
Why PockEd?
From our research, we realised that in order to emphasise the importance of financial literacy, we had to situate the solution somewhere that is readily accessible – for most young adults, this means their daily banking application.
1. Financial education
- Bite-sized financial literacy topics tailored to the user's stage in life
- Includes topic around life Achievements (e.g. buying a house), and fundamental knowledge (e.g. Investing, Budgeting, Saving, and Spending)
2. Create shared saving goals with friends
- Shared saving goals increases personal financial responsibility through peer accountability
- Be prepared for expenses by saving in advance
- Introduces a social aspect to personal finance, to de-stigmatise financial conversations
3. Budgeting
- A core banking feature and skill that encourages mindful spending
- Easily visualise and understand spending habits
1 Where did we begin?
Secondary Research
- Literature review on relevant articles and research
- Competitive analysis on existing solutions (e.g. financial literacy podcasts, blogs, e-courses, influential figures & education programs)
Primary Research
Next we investigated deeply on how young adults aged 15 – 24 experience financial literacy:
- Interviews (8 interviewees) to gather personal experiences and opinions
- Questionnaires (56 responses) to validate or challenge findings from interviews
- Diary studies (7 participants) to gather long-term behavioural and perceptual changes
Data Analysis
After gathering all the data, we used affinity diagramming as an inductive approach to reach our insights.
❓Challenge: How can we address unmotivated participants?
Some people dropped out of the diary studies, decreasing the overall number of complete responses. As we had anticipated this, more participants than desired were recruited. However, in the future, it will be important to evaluate how we could incentivise or motivate participants to remain consistent for the full study period.
Refining the Problem Statement
Original: How do young adults experience financial literacy?
New: How can we integrate reliable financial literacy in young adults' daily lives and motivate their interest for self-learning via a digital solution?
Key insights
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Skepticism
Learn as you go
Social influence
2 User Personas
User Archetypes
Based on our research, we created 3 user personas that embodied the needs of distinct user groups. We regularly referred back to them during the entire design process, as it helped us envision and understand the varied user needs.
Storyboards
A storyboard was created for each persona, clearly visualising how our users encounter daily struggles with different financial problems.
❓Challenge: Which persona's issues do we prioritise?
We realised that solving for "edge users" – people who experience the most difficulty – would allow us to address most pain points. Thus with our solution, we focused on Confused Carolina and Literate Lachlan as the two main persona archetypes that represent either extremes.
3 Concept Ideation
Ideation Methods
Using ideation methods such as reverse thinking and crazy 8’s as a starting point, our team refined three initial ideas:
- Educational Neobank
- Community Learning Hub
- Interactive Pop up for Awareness
Decision Matrix
To choose the strongest concept, we analysed the three ideas using a decision matrix. Criteria used was derived from our research. For example, "customisable to individual's financial literacy level or life stage" was selected as we found that the levels of financial literacy greatly varied depending on the range of life experiences an individual had.
Our final digital solution combined the strengths of two ideas – an educational neobank and a community learning hub.
Ethics Canvas
We made important concept changes to our solution using the ethics canvas, helping us design inclusively and responsibly.
An ethical issue we addressed:
Our initial idea of a "virtual upgradable world that reflected the user's financial achievements" was a concern as it invades the user's privacy (especially as finances are usually a sensitive topic).
Additionally, this may encourage users to fixate on comparing financial achievements with friends, which can enforce an unhealthy mindset.
In consideration of this, we decided to rid the virtual world. Instead, friends will be able to work together and save towards a common target.
4 Prototyping
We focused on the three core features rather than creating the entire PockEd application.
Starting with low-fidelity sketches we iterated through wireframes and interactive high-fidelity Figma prototypes, testing with users or experts at each step:
- Think aloud
- Interviews
- Heuristic evaluations
- System usability scale surveys
Each round of testing was guided by specific tasks for the user to complete, allowing us to gauge how the user would interact with different features of the app. We recorded user task completion time and mistakes made, to locate the major pain points.
Final Screens
5 Reflection 💭
Through this case study I experienced the entire design process from start to end, focusing on iterative design. I improved my skills as a designer through learning new research, prototyping, and testing methods.
Key insights
- It's a no brainer that user testing is key to design. I have come to understand that testing is only good with comprehensive data analysis – which takes time!
Strengths
- We reprioritised when needed. Initially a feature of PockEd we wireframed was the sign-up process. However upon further reflection we recognised other aspects of the app as having higher priority.
Limitations
- Although we were able to comprehensively test with users, the sheer volume of feedback collected resulted in a scattered focus of where we actually implemented changes. Sometime we just ended up making the "easiest" improvements rather than focusing on the bigger picture. In the future, I will aim to prioritise where my effort goes.
- For a more holistic project outcome, we should have implemented accessibility considerations. Some visual features may not adhere 100% to the WCAG (web content accessibility guidelines).
