Money Trail
A personalized financial timeline for first-time earners
Time
February 2021 - May 2021
Team Members
Mansi Agarwal, Cody Chen, Hailey Jeong
Context
Blend Inc. & User Experience Research & Evaluation Course
Role
I acted as our team’s User Research Lead. I led our team in quantitative analyses and ensured we implemented rigorous but efficient methods best suited for enhancing our understanding of user needs. I contributed to the teams’ protocols and interview scripts.
Summary
Young adults often avoid financial planning, leading to additional hurdles and stress when they need to make large purchases like buying a home. To meet this need, we designed a personalized financial timeline that integrates with users’ banks and provides personalized support to young adults early on for learning financial literacy and keeping track of their finances over time.
THE PROBLEM
Young adults in their late 20s often begin the process of preparing to purchase their first home shortly before they begin their search. Financial institutions across the board agree this is too late - beginning this process sooner would result in a much smoother and enjoyable process for first-time homebuyers.
Our team aimed to produce a solution that would engage young adults in financial planning early so they would be well-positioned when they start seriously considering a home purchase.
THE SOLUTION
Our solution, a personalized timeline for young adults at the crucial juncture of earning their first paycheck, allows users to understand that simple financial planning early on can benefit them down the line and learn how to responsibly budget when they have this major income shift.
The push needed to get started
Money Trail offers a nudge for young adults to plan their finances. Otherwise, young adults tend to rely on their parents for financial guidance and don’t think about their finances.
Ease while integrating finances
Because young adults are not willing to spend much time planning out their finances, Money Trail integrates directly with their banking portal so all their information is accurate and requires little time and energy to input.
Personalized goals, customizable for each user
A personalized timeline is recommended to each user based on their finances and their wants and needs. This gives our users confidence in their finances and the freedom to collaborate with the portal.
THE PROCESS
Background Research
Data Analysis
Our team hoped to understand which types of homes young adults are purchasing and the financial burden of owning relative to renting. I summarized data from the Housing Affordability Data System (HADS) for young adults (18-34).
For most buyers, income will not determine house size.
Average incomes are around the same whether young adults purchase homes with 0, 1, 2, or 3 bedrooms. The size of the house purchased likely is not predicted by buyer income, at least until 4+ rooms are considered.
Renting is more of a financial burden than buying.
Owners are much more likely to have their monthly housing payment make up less than 30% of their monthly income. Renters are more likely to have their monthly housing payment make up 30% or more of their monthly income.
Experiential & Information Research
To gain further understanding of young adults’ attitudes about financial planning and homebuying, we researched spaces where young adults typically share their thoughts and we examined the academic literature in the area. In particular, my academic background helped the team develop a rigorous research-driven solution.
Exploring social media
People are skeptical of advice online because “just save money” is a common theme, something not possible for many. This finding led us to integrate our product directly with the user’s banks, more trusted and familiar financial institutions. Down the road, this may allow for even stronger trust with the bank when the day for homebuying comes.
Considering research on financial planning
Young people feel somewhat competent and engaged with financial planning and do not feel that it is majorly complex or particularly emotionally overwhelming.
Financial literacy (especially with regard to knowledge of the local financial system) empowers young people to make financial decisions.
Examining how others aid in habit forming
Apps are more successful at maintaining users when they require less effort, are easy to understand, and provide what feels like a unique, individual experience.
They can motivate by providing positive feedback and reducing negative feedback, including reward systems, and allow for tracking over time (i.e., memories, chronological searching for past feedback).
Generative Research
Generative Think-Aloud Protocol
We aimed to understand the financial literacy of 18-year-olds by having them search their banking portal while pointing out features - ones that they use regularly, predict will be useful in the future, would use if they needed assistance, find confusing, and use to assess their financial situation.
Young people feel lost when financial planning.
Young people have relatively little exposure to financial knowledge for various reasons, which makes them unable to plan for the future. For this reason, they need a push to learn more about finances.
We incorporated this insight into our solution by 1) providing more support for financial literacy 2) recognizing young people’s agency and ability in learning new things.
Young people can recognize tools that will help later.
When young adults are made aware of resources, they can perceive the resources’ future usefulness easily.
This made us confident that a solution could be welcomed by our users. We additionally aimed to help make people aware of simple resources that they already have access to.
Artifact Analysis
During our artifact analysis, we asked participants to bring in an image of their dream home. This led to an important insight that people’s career goals and future family dictate their future home aspirations.
We found that people often talk about their future career and family when asked about their dream house - they consider variable personal factors that they deem important now to think about what they would deem important in the future. This finding led me to uncover a crucial time point for our users, a time where at least some of these unknown variables start to get answers - when they get their first real job. At this point, they might have a better understanding of their income, what their financial goals are, and what their family might look like. With this insight, we developed our precise definition of our target users.
Explorative Research
Brainstorming Solutions & Speed Dating
Before creating our storyboards for speed dating, we first walked the wall to review findings from our background and generative research phases. We then brainstormed solutions as a team using the Crazy 8’s method. We voted on the top needs and concepts as a team and developed our storyboards. In our speed dating, one board best addressed our users’ needs.
I created this storyboard to meet the user need for a smooth transition to receiving a first regular paycheck. We asked users the leading question of “Do you ever wonder how long you’ll have to wait before you can buy your own home?”
Success with this storyboard led us to brainstorm new design opportunities to expose young people to very foundational but interesting financial knowledge to grow their confidence in handling their own money:
Low-stake touchpoint. With a simple nudge, we could positively change their mindset towards finances by increasing their interaction with the topic of home-buying and financial planning, financial institutions, etc., so that they can feel I know more than a bare minimum.
Transparency. By showing the sources for information, we could build people’s trust in the platform.
High-quality recommendations. Given that people like to do independent searching on their own, we could aid them as they search for information proactively by themselves.
Evaluative Research
Experience Prototyping
After considering our speed dating findings, we brainstormed our user’s journey with our solution before creating our lo-fi prototype.
We conducted our experience prototyping with our lo-fi online banking portal integration.
Our participants were prompted to imagine they had just been hired for their first job and earned their first real paycheck. They were asked to imagine that they have big financial goals for a house someday down the line, but they’re not sure how much they should be saving each month to achieve them.
Our findings from prototyping indicated our next iteration should:
Minimize effortful onboarding —> so we directly integrated financial information from the user’s bank.
Make design Improvements —> so we included units and added minimums and maximums for context
Prompt users with reminders —> so we included regular but infrequent progress notifications
Final Design
Poster
Our team presented our poster with our solution to stakeholders and fellow UX researchers.
Looking Forward
Our solution offers young adults a system for developing a healthy financial future early on. Based on our research, there are still some ways our next iteration can grow:
Include notifications. Our users noted that receiving occasional reminder notifications would be useful. This is in line with our background research which indicates that positive feedback can help people maintain goals.
Include social motivators. Our generative research indicated that young adults are highly motivated by social factors. They even show sparks of joy related to finances when they can talk about finances with their friends.
Reach even younger users. Our solution is aimed at users earning their first paycheck because these users are most motivated to think about finances and most receptive to financial advice. Perhaps we could reach younger users with our solution by including a system that allows users to create multiple futures by playing with different income possibilities.