📖 Background
Aimset Hackathon
Aimset fosters a vibrant environment where over 150 hackers and creators come together over the course of 4 weeks to transform ideas into a functional prototype.
As a lead designer, I spearheaded UI design initiatives and conducted comprehensive usability testing. I strategized, prototyped, and collaborated closely with design and development teams to ensure cohesive design solutions aligned with user needs and project goals.
📋 Context
Young adults today grapple with soaring tuition, living costs, and student loan burdens, creating a complex financial landscape.
Many young adults lack the financial literacy or resources to effectively manage their money, leading to stress, poor spending habits, difficulty reaching their financial goals, and planning for their future.
⚡Problem
How might we empower young adults to navigate the financial maze?
Emerging adults navigate a financial tightrope, balancing immediate needs with future aspirations on limited income. Feeling stuck and stressed, they often lack the tools to organize their finances, making the path to a secure future daunting.
💡 Solution
Bridging the gap to financial confidence - making saving fun for emerging adults
An incentive-driven website that empowers young adults to enhance their financial planning skills through goal-setting and skill-building challenges.
📚 Market Research
Competitive landscape: Our research revealed gaps in existing financial apps for young adults.
While existing platforms might assist in tracking spending, we've identified an opportunity to not only fill these voids but to revolutionize the way college students manage their finances.
👤 User Research
Our research revealed key insights into the financial realities of young adults.
Young adults experience stress from lifestyle choices and student loans, affecting their mental health. They feel uneasy about budgeting, saving for the future, and find retirement planning intimidating due to knowledge gaps, fear of errors, and uncertainty.
💁♀️Persona
To better understand our users, we created this persona based on extensive user research and interviews.
Understanding this persona guides us in tailoring our website to address specific needs and pain points of our target users. By empathizing with Bill's financial challenges and goals, we can design features that directly address his concerns and deliver significant value.
❤️🩹 Empathy Map
We explored Bill Doe's financial challenges through an empathy map.
This map details Bill's views on financial management, including student loans, budgeting, and goals for financial security. Understanding these insights helps us customize our website to provide tools and resources that support Bill's journey to financial stability and independence.
🚀 Design process
Time to design- it's time to dive into the creative phase.
At Saveup, our team focused on user-centered design. Through extensive research, including interviews and surveys, we identified key financial challenges. These insights guided the development of core features such as goal setting and gamification, aimed at encouraging savings among users.
📈 User flow
We began assembling the information architecture with a focus on prioritizing key features.
Based on user feedback, we designed a user flow to help young adults set goals, save effectively, and stay motivated through challenges and rewards, fostering consistent savings habits.
📐 Wireframes
Once we determined which features to prioritize for this MVP, we began creating wireframes.
We defined goals and challenges, then tested early prototypes to evaluate user navigation and identify pain points on our website.
📝 Usability Testing
Our design team validated design direction and uncovered future enhancements.
Process: We recruited 10 young adults and presented scenarios and design concepts with prototypes for feedback prior to development.
Results: Positive overall response confirmed our design direction. Additionally, user feedback identified valuable future enhancements that we couldn't get to during this MVP because of time constraint.
I think everything is where it’s suppose to be. The hierarchy is clear, visually it’s very simple, in a good way.
Mila M.
User 01
Future enhancements
Share with friends: Users can share their progress with friends.
Streaks: Include other gamified elements like maintaining streaks.
🔄 Design Iteration 1
Goal dashboard: Enhanced user control and navigation options
I redesigned the goal dashboard view to provide users with improved functionality and usability.
Before
The user expressed scalability concerns regarding the interface, particularly with numerous listed goals on the page, prompting the need to optimize design without sacrificing usability.
After
To address this, we made each category collapsible and added a search bar for easier goal navigation.
We also identified the need to add "Add Money" and "Edit Goal" buttons for easy access, allowing users to make adjustments as needed.
🔄 Design Iteration 2
Refined Edit Goals Section to align with Saveup design lanugage
The edit goals section has been aligned to match the design language of other pages, ensuring a cohesive and seamless user experience across the platform.
Before
Several young adults noticed that the design language of the "Edit Goal" feature was markedly different from that of the dashboard page and hard to locate some of the features.
After
We revamped the approach by implementing a popup modal in the wire-frame. We also added a badge section where users can easily track their rewards as well as a noticeable "Delete" and "Cancel" buttons for clearer user interaction.
🔄 Design Iteration 3
Narrowing down the scope to the key feature.
Due to time constraints, we were unable to delve into the details of the other gamification elements. However, we concentrated on the primary aspect: providing users with milestone rewards.
Before
Initially, we aimed to incorporate streaks; however, due to time constraints, we were unable to address this in the current iteration.
After
Keeping the MVP in mind, we prioritized in-progress challenges for easier visibility and integrated badges directly into each challenge for clarity, addressing user confusion from testing.
💖 Reflection
Lessons in design Lleadership: Insights and Challenges
This case study provided significant insights into design leadership. While successful, I aimed for deeper insights. Conducting rigorous usability testing to gather statistically significant data would have been optimal. Implementing streaks to gamify challenges could have further enhanced user engagement.
Leading a diverse team within a tight deadline presented challenges, but I am immensely proud of their unwavering dedication and our timely delivery. This experience underscored the importance of clear communication, flexibility, and fostering a collaborative environment, which were crucial for achieving success under pressure.