MoneyWise
Role
UX/UI designer
Duration
Sept - Dec, 2024
Team
Context
This project was a uni project responding to the design brief in ACM CHI 2025 Student Design Competition. The goal was to design a solution that contributes to one or more of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This project addresses the gender gap in financial literacy.
I worked in a team of five, responsible for designing the interaction and visual element of the final prototype.
Problem
Research showed that women generally possessed less financial knowledge than men. Female university students reported that financial education felt inaccessible and inapplicable to their current life stage, and required too much effort to find.
Solution
A financial education app that provided personalised content tailored to users' life events and learning styles.
Read ahead for my design process.
Our user group is women college students based in London.
We surveyed 41 users and found 58% of them felt anxious about their financial decisions and lacked confidence in their financial knowledge. Then, we conducted interviews with 5 users to understand their pain points in gaining financial literacy and confidence.
Insights from User Interview
Current life stage facilitates relevant financial learning
"When I grow up and I need like actual financial help, then I’ll reach out to that, let's say, if I buy a house or something. But because I think I'm still young, I don't really have a specific plan just yet.” - p4
Preference for low-effort information search due to busy lifestyle
“I wouldn't seek it out myself because I'm quite busy. I don't feel like I've got the time to be seeking out financial advice. It would need to come to me.” - p1
Unfamiliar financial terminology and concepts deter users from engaging with financial learning
“If it was terminology that I didn't fully understand, then I probably think ‘oh that's not for me’ because I don't really understand that. There's not really much point in me engaging in that, or reading that article because I don't know what that means. That's like another world.” - p1
Define
We summarised the problem statement as follows:
Women university students avoid engaging with financial education because the information is overwhelming, inapplicable to their current life stage, and requires too much effort to find. This hinders their ability to build confidence and develop financial skills.
User persona
Ideate
To address the challenges users face in acquiring financial knowledge, we conducted ideation workshops featuring Crazy 8 and How-might-we. We narrowed 30+ initial ideas down to 5 using dot voting and evaluated the ideas on an impact/practicality matrix.
We further developed 2 ideas (learning journal and card game) with storyboards and produced paper prototypes for testing.
Storyboards
Personalised Learning Journal
Scenario-based Card Game
Focus group
We conducted a focus group with 3 users to gather feedback on the two prototypes. The discussion transcripts were analysed using the Google HEART framework, categorizing user reactions into Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, and Retention.
Users expressed an overwhelming preference for the journal to the card game for its highly personalised learning materials and its potential to fit with their existing routine.
Focus Group Key User Insights
High engagement with the physical product
Users appreciated the physical journal, describing it as a refreshing and enjoyable alternative to app-based solutions.
Value integration with existing routinue
Users highlighted the importance of integrating the journal's calendar with existing digital calendar apps.
Desire the flexibility and convenience
Users emphasised the need for flexibility in updating the calendar and accessing learning content. They expressed a need to access learning materials on their phones, indicating the potential for a complementary digital solution.
First iteration
We iterated on the learning journal. The main idea of this prototype was that users would learn about relevant financial topics while using the journal to plan their life, integrating financial learning into part of their routine.
Based on user feedback from the focus group, we
Improved the flexibility of the calendar inside the journal using a sticky note design
Introduced an app to host the onboarding process and a digital calendar for added convenience
Learning journal
Digital Complementary: Calendar and Onboarding Questionnaire
Usability testing
We conducted usability testing with 3 users to identify usability issues. Users completed three tasks following a think-aloud protocol:
Fill out the onboarding questionnaire
Locate learning content
Update the calendar
User Feedback from Usability Testing
Preference for a digital experience that integrate with existing routine
While user expressed enthusiasm for the paper-based learning experience, many did not have the habit of using a physical journal and preferred managing their daily events on a digital calendar, such as Google Calendar. Additionally, the process of maintaining the physical calendar was described as tedious.
Desire for actionable and personally relevant learning materials
Users expressed that the learning page content could be more “actionable,” with specific steps to achieve financial goals. Some felt the current content could “just be Googled”.
Detailed Analysis of User Feedback
Final iteration
We transformed the learning journal into an app. First, we created a calendar interaction in the app that would allow users to plan their life events and see their upcoming lessons. The interaction mirrored Google Calendar’s for a familiar experience.
Update Events in Calendar
The learning content now contained a "related personal event", based on which the learning content was suggested and a checklist of actionable steps to consolidate the learning.
Learning Content with Related Personal Event & Checklist
Prototype
Finally, we prototyped the whole experience in a high-fidelity prototype with a consistent design system and branding. The following demo showcases prominent features.
Users personalise learning content through an onboarding process. It prompts users to input upcoming life events that require financial knowledge, which is used to recommend relevant learning materials. It also gathers information about the user's learning style, which is used to tailor their learning experience.
Onboarding
Newsletters are scheduled around the time of a personal event. These emails provide bite-sized, event-specific financial content that users can skim on the go. Calls-to-action buttons can direct users back to the app for additional information if they wish to learn more.
Email Newsletter
The app integrates the MoneyWise calendar with Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar, embedding financial learning into users’ routines.
Calendar Integration
Learnings & reflections
Need for more specific user persona.
The iteration has gone through major changes, abandoning the initial physical product and transitioning into a fully digital experience. The main reason was because we created the first prototype based on a persona who used physical planning tools and then tested the prototype with users who did not use any physical journals. We should have refined our persona after the focus group based on their behavioural characteristics, which would have informed us that our initial design may have over-prioritised a subset of the user group whose behavioural traits did not generalise to the wider user group.
Not focus group but Wizard of Oz testing.
The focus group were awed by the craftiness of the physical prototype during the focus group and gave overwhelmingly positive feedback to the ideas. However, many impracticality of using a physical journal was not revealed until later on when the prototype was tested with real-life tasks. This showed that a focus group study was prone to biasing people reacting favourably, possibly because we were discussing a hypothetical product. We should have tested the functionality of the early prototype using the Wizard of Oz method in an individual setting, where the prototype would feel more realistic and individuals would be less influenced by the group opinion.
Improving on interview techniques.
Learning from our misjudgement in the focus group, we have modified the way we ask questions in usability testing. Instead of asking "do you like the calendar feature?", where participants were more likely to respond favourably, we asked specific questions such as "how would you incorporate the calendar feature in your life to learn more about finance?". This helped us understand how users would use the feature in real life and judge if the current product would fit their needs.
Retrospective interview with older women.
Some participants we interviewed had limited understanding of where their financial knowledge lack and challenges involved in acquiring knowledge because they likely did not realise there was a need to acquire financial education themselves. One possible way to obtain more insights was to interview older women who wished they had invested in financial education earlier. This insights may encourage younger women to realise their needs in acquiring financial knowledge and plan for their future self.