Is there a way to prepare young people to manage their finances when they start working and making money? Could it be more engaging and entertaining?
The initial inspiration for this project was an Excel sheet I made in college trying to teach my siblings how the stock market worked. A few years later, I noticed while talking to newly working, recently graduated friends that many of them, besides not knowing how the stock market worked, also didn’t really have any idea how to make a financial plan, or even why they should create one.
The final project for Google’s UX Design Course emphasizes designing for social good - when I read the assignment, I thought back to some of these conversations and wondered if there could be a more engaging and scalable way to help young people prepare before they had a conversation with a nosy friend. I was already referring friends to free financial planners, so when this project came up, I changed gears and started by interviewing some college students.
I began by conducting interviews with college students about their financial planning and uncovered a few key insights. While the study participants had some basic grasp of financial concepts, none of them felt confident in their knowledge.
Among the study participants, I noticed that the women I surveyed expressed a low level of confidence in their financial knowledge, even though overall, they had an equivalent degree of knowledge to the men. Some participants mentioned that finances were rarely taught to them because people assumed that they wouldn’t be interested.
Across the board, both men and women were looking for simpler ways to understand investments, debt, and financial terms, but they were often not encouraged to learn or were overwhelmed by the vast multitudes of terms and concepts. I used these patterns to uncover three main pain points and developed a user persona for our target audience.
At the very beginning my idea was a social game, like a Spyfall for stock market trading, that would simulate a micro-stock market to help young people understand the way that stock prices moved. After conducting the interviews, I recognized that the need was deeper than simply understanding the stock market - the idea evolved to be a more holistic platform for financial wellness, with the Stock Game as just one of the games on that platform.
I reviewed other platforms like Bankrate, Nerdwallet, Investopedia and found that although they were great for comparisons and in-depth knowledge, there was not really an informative and engaging platform for targeted specifically towards younger people, especially women, with a focus on holistic financial preparedness.
I conducted a couple rounds of Crazy Eights ideation exercises to come up with concepts and features for the platform both on mobile and desktop experiences. Using these concepts, I created paper wireframes to imagine the elements of the screens as well as a sitemap to develop the way the app would be structured.
I created a color scheme and chose a typeface to build the product mockups around, and to give a consistent look and feel to the platform. The colors are meant to look like a game-esque hue of traditionally financial colors while being easy on the eyes. I came up with the name Welfun to capture the idea of learning to build wealth while -- you guessed it -- having fun.
I took the ideas and used them to develop the basic user experience, first as a digital wireframe and then as a high-fidelity mockup. I created both a desktop, webpage version and a mobile-first phone version as well. The design is a simple card based platform that allows you to access tools and games that you can play with your friends.
I conducted a usability study with the digital wireframe prototype and used the insights from that study to further iterate on the elements on screen, to end up with the on-screen elements for the high-fidelity mockups.
Financial literacy is something I am personally very passionate about, and this app was an attempt at converting the content of my conversations with friends into something scalable that could help more people and also provide tools to manage and improve your personal financial outlook.
I was surprised by how different the original idea was from the final execution, as I incorporated feedback from interviewees and study participants, to find something that more specifically addressed the challenges that young people trying to understand their finances face. Hopefully a platform like this one can become a way to improve financial education in the next generation.
