LAUNCH
HYPOTHETICAL FINANCIAL LITERACY APP DESIGN
Timeline
Spring 2023
Project Brief
The goal of this project was to create a fun and engaging app for young adults that would increase their financial literacy. This was achieved through creating an app that gamifies learning about financial literacy under the Rocket Money brand using Sprint methodologies.
Team
Macy Adams
Abbie Hunt
Erin Hughes
Sydney Hughes
Amelia Neumeister
Lauren Pike
Jessica Sherrington
Tools
Figma
Illustrator
#7B16FF
LONG TERM GOALS & CHALLENGES
We want to help young people transition into the real world by equipping them with life skills and greater financial literacy.
Some primary challenges we identified were figuring out how to make this both interesting and relevant to our users. Most importantly, we needed to figure out how young people would want to use it.
HOW MIGHT WE?
We asked our experts, came up with some "How might we?" questions, and categorized them into 4 themes.
Performance, user background or needs, accessibility, and value proposition.
Our most important "How might we?" was How might we generate relevant content our customers will see value in?
CURRENT USER JOURNEY
We mapped our user's current journey so that we could best understand their pain points were and when they occurred.
We followed our user, a young adult with their first post-grad job. We discovered that only after realizing the importance of financial literacy through experience did they seek information from various sources.
INSPIRATION RESEARCH
We needed to see what inspiration was already out there, both in finance and other industries. Each team member researched a variety of inspirations and compiled a list or board to share with the group.
Our group looked at activity trackers, language learning apps, fitness apps, tax filing, games, and more.
INSPIRATION RESEARCH
One of the most important resources we looked at in our Lightning Demos was a company called Rocket Money. This resource had a desktop site and mobile app that already had a lot of features we were interested in for our product. Some of these features include things such as tracking spending and an educational aspect.
This discovery led our group to ask the question, "What should we do now?"
THE PIVOT
During our research, our group noticed that Rocket Money, as well as most other finance-based digital services, could only be used by those over 18.
We also realized that Rocket Money's learning center is neither fun and engaging nor accessible. It is comprised solely of text based articles.
This again led our group to question, "How might we create a fun and engaging educational experience for youth under the age of 18?"
SOLUTION SKETCHES
We zeroed in on some prevalent features within our solution sketches.
We wanted an intake that would find out what the user was most interested in learning about to customize their experience. We wanted to gamify our financial learning journey through quizzes and achievements. We also thought it would be fun to lean into the space aesthetic that the name "Rocket Money" invokes.
Ultimately, we landed on creating a new product for Rocket Money that would expand their user base into a younger demographic and serve as a precursor for their primary product.
STORYBOARD
We came up with a flow that takes our user from onboarding to a journey home screen. From there, they would be able to complete modules by learning a financial literacy lesson, having a review of the lesson in the form of a quiz, and earning an achievement for passing.
PROTOTYPE
We developed a brand identity for our app based on the Rocket Money app and its online learning center. We named it "Launch by Rocket Money" and decided on three important user instances to prototype in our design:
The onboarding experience, lessons and quizzes, and the user's progress and achievements.
ITERATIONS
We worked through multiple iterations of the overall design before we landed on the final style.
FINAL PROTOTYPE DEMO
USER TESTING
During testing, we observed how users interacted with the app, gathered feedback and noted any pain points or usability issues they encountered. This helped us validate many of our initial questions and subsequent design decisions.
After the tests and notes were compiled, we analyzed and categorized the feedback into common themes to identify patterns, both positive and negative.
USER TESTING
Overall, the responses were positive and confirmed we had prototyped a viable solution. Testers found the app easy to navigate and use, and the content and quiz question were simple enough to be understood by our target age group.
However, not all features were clear to testers. For instance, several noted it would be helpful to have a way track learning progress, and some weren't sure if they would be competing against strangers or friends and family. Most also seemed to miss that we meant for the app to be very customized to the user. Just a few tweaks to the interface, wording and labels would be all it would take to alleviate these pain points.
CONCLUSION
While user testing provided valuable information should we be further developing the app, we agreed our prototype would ultimately help us meet our Long Term Goal.
Overall, we deemed our Sprint a success. We were able to establish a consistent UI, create accessible learning options with an intuitive flow, established a unique value proposition, and adhered to Sprint methodologies.
