FinLit by Figo
FinLit is an app which helps young first time bankers achieve long term financial literacy and loyalty.
FinLit by FIGO
Timeline: 5 day Remote Sprint - May 2020
Purpose: Academic project with RBC and BrainStation
My Role - Stitcher/Facilitator
My involvement
As a team we first established roles and responsibilities for this Sprint, I would be the Facilitator ensuring everything stayed on track and making sure we kept the purpose of the project in mind throughout. I was the prototype stitcher and I also conducted user testing and worked on the presentation slides while the makers built out the screens.
Design Challenge
The Client
Figo Bank is a fictitious bank created by RBC for the purpose of this challenge.
Figo Bank is a friendly and approachable brand whose primary goal as a business is to demystify the complexity of the many elements of saving, spending and investing money.
The Brief
Figo customers already manage their personal finances through the Figo responsive website so they want the mobile app to provide value that uniquely speaks to the target customer types.
We had three target audiences to choose from, after some discussion we decided to focus on first time bankers as our core user.
Deliverables
Native Mobile App
1 distinct task for a native mobile app offering, created for one target customer of your choice.
7-10 screens (depending on the needs of your narrative)
Marketing Desktop Site
Marketing desktop website (pre-login screen) demonstrating how customers will learn about the new mobile app offering.
1 - screen, desktop website.
Final Presentation
5-8 minutes in length.
Presented to your client.
Identify the pain-points of your target demographic, and show how your solution will alleviate these pain-points.
Take us through the narrative from your customer’s perspective including how they discovered the app.
Branding Requirements
The solution must be designed using Avenir as the primary font
The solution needs to be accessible to the widest audience; thus must be WCAG AA Compliant
It must reflect the following primary brand colours
Business Requirements
Accounts are associated with Client ID # (8 - digit number)
Displayed balances must support up to 11 digits (ie. $999,999,999.99)
Minimum required account types: Chequing/Savings/Credit
Transferring between Pastel Bank customers is free, while e-Transfers charge $1 per transaction between institutes.
Signing up must be prioritised over signing in.
Day 1 was a heavy day with a lot to establish to set us up for a successful week.
Get to know each other as a team
Secondary Research
Goal Setting
Assumptions into Questions
Map users through space
Talk to people
How Might we question
Organise HMW notes
Team Voting
Target selection
Identify Target user
Review checklist
Secondary Research
As a team we all dived into researching about Gen Z, their financial habits, their digital habits and what makes them tick.
Findings
Each member took a different tactic, I chose to look into the apps Gen Z use the most and their attitude towards tech as well as their desires as consumers.
What I found was that Gen Z has retreated to smaller, more insulated social networking spaces, to connect with others and just be themselves.
They want small peer to peer, community-based apps interacting with people that they trust.
So what did we find out from our research
93% of youth aged 15 to 30 use social networking sites. Today's youth are unlike any generation before! They are more: Diverse, Connected, Socially Engaged, Educated
77% of youth aged 15 to 30 use the Internet to follow news and current affairs.
We realised 67% of high school students feel like they don’t have their finances under control.
In July 2018, 15-29 year-olds represented 19.2% of the country's population. Medium growth population projections suggest that this proportion will fall to 18% by 2035.
As a team we went through all the findings we had compiled and worked through the information. We did this through shared docs where we could all engage and collaborate with the information with ease.
Primary Research
Our group goal going forward was to educate teens with a fun and approachable solution to instill financial habits and to retain them as lifelong users of FinLit by FIGO .
We made the assumption that teens would find value and be motivated to use a financial app and that setting financial goals for their future whether it be short, mid, long-term financial goals it would still act as an important first step towards becoming financially secure and educated.
This led us to plan out what we conclude the path our consumer currently goes through in order to sign up for our service. The teen asking their parent about banking and the parent deciding to talk to teen about banking and what they should do.
Remote Interviews
In order to validate our assumptions we interviewed parents ages (30-45) of children with varying age ranges who currently bank online. We interviewed parents because we knew the teens use of Figo would require parental review and consent. We also incorporated secondary research to validate our assumptions, like the types of apps most popular with teens and the reasons they resonate with them.
Dig Deeper
What bank are you with? Have you ever switched banks before, and why?
How did you develop your financial habits?
How do you plan on teaching your kids these habits?
What do you like/dislike about your mobile banking experience?
How do you think banking has changed from the time you were a teen, and how do you think it’ll affect the way your teen does their banking?
Warm Up Questions:
Can you tell me about yourself? (Age, Location, Occupation)
Could you tell me if you have a bank account for your child and if so which bank?
How did you decide what bank to open your child's account with?
how did you sign up for these services?
So, once we refined our project goal, we wanted to map out our teen’s journey through an end goal of booking a grad trip.
We learned in our research that although teens aren’t yet thinking about traditional goals like buying a house or retirement, but Figo can still help teens pivot their wants into financial goals.
We wanted to keep in line with Figo’s friendly and approachable branding and demystify the complexity of saving and spending for our user.
We conducted dot voting to choose a fitting statement which would guide us through the remainder of the project.
HMW create an immersive social experience for teens to help them develop healthy financial habits?
Meet Matt! He’s 16 and is about to start grade 12, so he’s got grad trip on the brain.
Through our research insights we found Matt’s major pain points are that banking apps aren’t simple and attention grabbing enough, he doesn’t want his parents butting in all the time, and he’s frustrated when he overspends and can’t understand why he can’t just buy whatever he wants when he wants.
His goals are to be able to do as much as he can with his friends, to not have his parents hassle him all the time, and to be able to use apps that are easy, simple to understand and meet the social needs he has with his friends.
Based on this, we landed on some key areas of opportunity. First, we’d like to market a solution with Matt in mind that gives him financial independence while also giving his parents a more casual approach to helping him develop healthier financial habits. He’s still a minor, so his parents approval of a solution needs to be considered.
We also saw opportunities in creating an app that’s fun and easy to understand and relates to Matt’s social needs while helping ease his frustration through transforming his life wants into financial goal management.
Day 2 started with more research, we looked into existing banking apps and apps that are most popular with GenZ.
We decided to use Jake Knapp’s decision making method as can be seen below, this was an excellent way to keep us moving and make decisions which kept the team on track for the limited time frame.
Jake Knapps’s decision making model
As a team we individually sketched solutions, using Crazy 8’s and Sketching, We then used dot voting what was excellent. We choose our winning sketch idea and moved on from there. This is where I came up with FinLit as a name and the team voted to use.
During Day 2 we also had the pleasure of having mentors from RBC check in with us about our progress and our plan so far.
Discussing our idea with them we decided to include gamification as a key part of the solution given the target market is GenZ.
Other things we wanted to focus on was building a solution which would encourage
return use,
incorporate friends and family,
be customisable and
would create healthy finical habits.
Divide and Concur
But stay in touch
Day 3 was all about getting our MVP built. Our makers set about building out our screens while myself and Camille started preparing our interview scripts, asset collecting, interview scheduling and building the skeleton of our stakeholder’s presentation. We popped in and out of the figma board they used to keep track of progress which was crucial to stitching the prototype together efficiently later.
Because this was a remote sprint so we all developed methods of staying in contact, stayed on calls to keep the channels open for easy and iterative communication
When the makers had finished the screens I set about stitching the prototype together, running through any glitches and ensuring we were ready to conduct our user testing on Day 4.
Figma board used by makers to create prototype.
Day 4 kicked off with a stand up and a run through of the prototype, finalisations on what we were testing and the script we would use.
User Testing
1 round of usability testing with 5 people was completed on Thursday May 14th, 2020 via Zoom.
Users were given the scenario of being a 16 year old planning a grad trip to Cuba with friends and was trying to save for it.
Task 1: Create a goal
Task 2: Share your progress
Task 3: Ask for Help
Key Testing Insights
• Need more sharing options
• Home screen is too text heavy
• Text behind badges is confusing
• Wants to know breakdown of who contributed what to the goal
More Feedback
Not cool asking your friends for money.
Was unsure of if those people are going on the trip.
Cool app, liked the gamification.
What do the badges mean?
Didn't know his friends were already added. Who is funding this, where is the breakdown and who can I see who is contributing what?
Where does the money go, from my savings and checking to a new account?
Text heavy
Wants to see the text behind the badges,
4000 was a shock,
why do you need approval for your goal
A little confused with all the screens.
Wasn't understanding why it said 4000 at the beginning and then explained later that it explained the breakdown.
Changes that we made
We needed to create a clearer way for our user to share with their friends and family.
People didn’t understand where the money was taken from and going afterwards.
We added a screen with breakdown of allocations and goals.
This allowed the user to click on each bar to see individual contributions and details.
Changes were made to the copy to help fix this issue.
We also concluded that the home screen was
text heavy and overwhelming.
Before
After
Users wanted to see their progress towards the goal rather than the total of the goal.
We changed this element so the larger number is what has been contributed so far.
After
Before
After making all the changes to the product the makers handed it over to me to stitch the prototype one last time ready for our presentation on the final day.
Presentation Day
Day 5, in under 8 mins we presented our project to stakeholders from RBC Toronto. all members of their in house design team.
I opened the presentation and introduced our team, goals, and project hopes then passed on to my other teams to complete the presentation.
Please take a look at the final Prototype.
If you remember from the start we were also tasked with creating a marketing website that would draw Matt in, please check it out.
Key takeaways
Communication is so important in projects like this. Being a fully remote project meant that we had to actively check in and keep our channels open to communication at all times, this was an excellent asset to our progress as a team. It allowed us to pitch in with someone if they needed help or bounce thoughts and ideas off each other.
Being strict with schedule was vital to our sucess in creating an environment where everyone felt equal and appreciated and we could just get on with our work, as facilator I set timelines to achieve certain tasks and checked in with my teammates to ensure we maintained our timeline.
Your previous knowledge doesn’t limit you as a designer, none of our team has a background in banking but with research and open minds we were able to create a product which was deemed a success by the mentors at RBC and a product that would work for our target audience.
Improvements
Because this was a 5 day sprint there are many things that could be improved, another round of user testing would be crucial to increase the usability of the app and I also think it would need to be double checked for accessibility standards.
Thanks for making it this far!! If you have any feedback or would like to work together please don’t wait around and hit me up.
