Wealthsimple x BrainStation
Hackathon
Problem
Working in a team of 2 UX designers and 4 full-stack software developers, we were given 24 hours to tackle the question:
How might we help Wealthsimple clients in Canada improve their financial literacy in order to make better financial decisions?
Outcome
Our solution introduced the addition of a personalized learning experience feature within the Wealthsimple app that encourages the user to increase their financial literacy with personalized articles.
Timeline
24 hours
February 2024
Team
2 designers
2 developers
Role
UX designer
UX researcher
Toolkit
Figma
Pen and paper
RESEARCH
Problem space
As a first step, we conducted secondary research to grasp a better understanding of our problem space.
24%
Only 24% of millennials
have basic financial literacy
27%
27% of millennials have not sought financial advice when they need it because they don’t know how to seek it
32%
32% of the public feel the distrust towards the banking sector
Assumptions
Based on our secondary research, we assumed that a lack of trust could be a barrier preventing millennials from improving their financial literacy.
One may think, why do I trust an organization to handle my money and give me advice? Do they really have my interests in mind?
Interviews
We ended up conducting one round of interviews with 3 participants between the ages of 24-37 who regularly used a financial service.
Our initial assumptions about trust were invalidated when we found that millennials did trust financial services. They just didn't trust themselves to seek out information.
"When it comes to learning about personal finance, I don't know where to start."
"It's hard to learn about finances online. There’s so much information and I find it overwhelming so I just don’t bother."
"I don’t seek out investment services because I don’t feel like I have enough money that would be worth investing."
DEFINE
Narrowing the scope
With insights from our user interviews, we identified an opportunity for design intervention: millennials want to learn about personal finance, but find it an overwhelming subject to approach.
Creating a how-might-we statement helped us focus on user needs and problems, rather than plummet into the pitfall of solution oriented thinking.
How might we help millennial Wealthsimple clients feel less overwhelmed when learning about personal finance so that they can feel more confident in their financial decisions?
Persona
To guide us in our design process and keep us aligned with our true user needs, we created a persona based on our interview insights.
Grace is a busy professional who is interested in improving her financial literacy, but is met with certain barriers.
Grace Davis
“I want to know where to start when it comes to learning about managing my finances. It's so discouraging.”
Job: Receptionist
Age: 32
Location: Toronto
Bio
Grace is a busy professional living in Toronto. She doesn’t know much about finance and has an incredibly busy schedule, finding the task of learning more about finances overwhelming and just another source of stress.
Behaviors
Does not have time to utilize more in-depth means of learning like courses
Motivations
Wants to feel more confident in her financial knowledge and decision making
Would like to know what a smaller amount of money can do when investing
Pain points
Finds it overwhelming to learn about finances
Always feels lost and overwhelmed when she tries to and ends up discouraged, abandoning the process
IDEATE
Storyboarding
Visualizing Grace's current experience with learning about personal finance helped us identify a point in her journey where she gets stuck in a vicious cycle.
Grace wants to learn more about personal finance.
Grace searches up an article for a foreign concept.
In the article, there are concepts that she does not understand.
The article is confusing and overwhelming to read.
Grace ends up in an endless loop of searching. Frustrated, she abandons the process.
Designing for Grace
Now that we had a good understanding of where we can offer design intervention, we authored user stories to consider some of the functions and features of a potential solution based on Grace's needs. We then translated them into tasks.
I want to read short, informative write-ups so that I can learn even if I don’t have a lot of time.
Feature:
Offer quick, helpful, bite-sized pieces of information
I want to learn what strategies are realistic to my financial position so that I can set tangible goals.
Feature:
Personalize suggestions for areas of learning to user’s financial position and literacy
I want to understand financial jargon so that I don’t feel lost when I read educational articles.
Feature:
Help define unfamiliar terms within the app for a seamless experience
Task flow
We then created a simple task flow diagram. Visualizing how content connects in our user flow was an important part of communicating with our developers.
THE SOLUTION
Our solution
With our deadline looming over us, we dove right into hi-fidelity prototyping to give our developers as much time as possible to bring our solution to life.
Communication and transparency with the team at each step of the way was key to streamlining this process, making for a smooth design handoff.
We added an easily accessible but unobtrusive navigation to the learning center on the home page.
The learning center is a personalized feed of articles that aims to improve the user's personal finance knowledge.
Financial jargon within articles is clickable, opening up a definition pop-up.
It all happens within the same page, allowing for a seamless experience. The user will never feel lost.
Did we solve the problem?
We think so, yes! Here's how:
We offer help with financial jargon within the page to minimize navigating through a ton of screens and making financial concepts easy to understand in context, breaking the "vicious cycle" pictured in Grace's storyboard.
We offer a quick way to improve financial literacy everyday. Building a routine of reading a short article everyday goes a long way to making this learning task far more digestible.
FUTURE THINKING
Next steps
Our next step would be to user test and validate our solution and iron out any usability issues.
Once the feature goes live, applying analytics to observe engagement is key to gauging the impact of our design.
User retention is the most important KPI— are users sticking around to use Wealthsimple services after they learn about personal finance?
Learnings
Communication is crucial 🤝
The key was to keep everyone in the loop at all times, delegate, and play smartly into everyone's strengths and weaknesses.
Manage time wisely 🕒
During this project, I had to prioritize tasks effectively and know to discard an idea if it is simply not feasible to complete during the given time frame.
Introspection 💭
I'm a perfectionist to a fault— this project was lesson in compromising and knowing when to let go of ideas in favor of moving forward.
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Hey, thanks for looking all the way down here. Click me for a fun fact!
Did you know that there are more trees on Earth than stars in our galaxy? 🪐
Sharks are older than both trees and the rings of Saturn!
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Woolly mammoths were still walking the Earth while the pyramids were being built!
Singing and speaking are not processed in the same part of the brain— but music and math are!
You can fit all the other planets in our solar system between Earth and the Moon!
The color orange was named after the fruit!
Fingernails grow at about the same rate that continents move!
You're slightly taller at night because your body is getting pulled by the gravity of the moon!
Okay, I'll be honest, that last one I totally made up because I'm running out of steam here. I'm happy to share some more over coffee though :) ☕
Wealthsimple x BrainStation
Hackathon
Wealthsimple x BrainStation Industry Project
Working in a team of 2 UX designers and 4 full-stack software developers, we were given 24 hours to tackle the question:
How might we help Wealthsimple clients in Canada improve their financial literacy in order to make better financial decisions?
Outcome
Our solution introduced the addition of a personalized learning experience feature within the Wealthsimple app that encourages the user to increase their financial literacy with personalized articles.
Timeline
24 hours
Feb 2024
Team
2 designers
2 developers
Role
UX designer
UX researcher
Toolkit
Figma
Pen & paper
RESEARCH
Problem space
As a first step, we conducted secondary research to grasp a better understanding of our problem space.
24%
Only 24% of millennials have basic financial literacy.
27%
27% of millennials have not sought financial advice when they need it because they don’t know how to seek it.
32%
32% of the public feel the distrust towards the banking sector.
Assumptions
Based on our secondary research, we assumed that a lack of trust could be a barrier preventing millennials from improving their financial literacy.
One may think, why do I trust an organization to handle my money and give me advice? Do they really have my interests in mind?
Interviews
We ended up conducting one round of interviews with 3 participants between the ages of 24-37 who regularly used a financial service.
Our initial assumptions about trust were invalidated when we found that millennials did trust financial services. They just didn't trust themselves to seek out information.
"When it comes to learning about personal finance, I don't know where to start."
"It's hard to learn about finances online. There’s so much information and I find it overwhelming so I just don’t bother."
"I don’t seek out investment services because I don’t feel like I have enough money that would be worth investing."
DEFINE
Narrowing the scope
With insights from our user interviews, we identified an opportunity for design intervention: millennials want to learn about personal finance, but find it an overwhelming subject to approach.
Creating a how-might-we statement helped us focus on user needs and problems, rather than plummet into the pitfall of solution oriented thinking.
How might we help millennial Wealthsimple clients feel less overwhelmed when learning about personal finance so that they can feel more confident in their financial decisions?
Persona
To guide us in our design process and keep us aligned with our true user needs, we created a persona based on our interview insights.
Grace is a busy professional who is interested in improving her financial literacy, but is met with certain barriers.
Grace Davis
“I want to know where to start when it comes to learning about managing my finances. It's so discouraging.”
Job: Receptionist
Age: 32
Location: Toronto
Bio
Grace is a busy professional living in Toronto. She doesn’t know much about finance and has an incredibly busy schedule, finding the task of learning more about finances overwhelming and just another source of stress.
Behaviors
Does not have time to utilize more in-depth means of learning like courses
Motivations
Wants to feel more confident in her financial knowledge and decision making
Would like to know what a smaller amount of money can do when investing
Pain points
Finds it overwhelming to learn about finances
Always feels lost and overwhelmed when she tries to and ends up discouraged, abandoning the process
IDEATE
Storyboarding
Visualizing Grace's current experience with learning about personal finance helped us identify a point in her journey where she gets stuck in a vicious cycle.
Grace wants to learn more about personal finance.
Grace searches up an article for a foreign concept.
In the article, there are concepts that she does not understand.
The article is confusing and overwhelming to read.
Grace ends up in an endless loop of searching. Frustrated, she abandons the process.
Designing for Grace
Now that we had a good understanding of where we can offer design intervention, we authored user stories to consider some of the functions and features of a potential solution based on Grace's needs. We then translated them into tasks.
I want to read short, informative write-ups so that I can learn even if I don’t have a lot of time.
Feature:
Offer quick, helpful, bite-sized pieces of information
I want to learn what strategies are realistic to my financial position so that I can set tangible goals.
Feature:
Personalize suggestions for areas of learning to user’s financial position and literacy
I want to understand financial jargon so that I don’t feel lost when I read educational articles.
Feature:
Help define unfamiliar terms within the app for a seamless experience
Task flow
We then created a simple task flow diagram. Visualizing how content connects in our user flow was an important part of communicating with our developers.
THE SOLUTION
Our solution
With our deadline looming over us, we dove right into hi-fidelity prototyping to give our developers as much time as possible to bring our solution to life.
Communication and transparency with the team at each step of the way was key to streamlining this process, making for a smooth design handoff.
We added an easily accessible but unobtrusive navigation to the learning center on the home page.
The learning center is a personalized feed of articles that aims to improve the user's personal finance knowledge.
Financial jargon within articles is clickable, opening up a definition pop-up.
It all happens within the same page, allowing for a seamless experience. The user will never feel lost.
Did we solve the problem?
We think so, yes! Here's how:
We offer help with financial jargon within the page to minimize navigating through a ton of screens and making financial concepts easy to understand in context, breaking the "vicious cycle" pictured in Grace's storyboard.
We offer a quick way to improve financial literacy everyday. Building a routine of reading a short article everyday goes a long way to making this learning task far more digestible.
FUTURE THINKING
Next steps
Our next step would be to user test and validate our solution and iron out any usability issues.
Once the feature goes live, applying analytics to observe engagement is key to gauging the impact of our design.
User retention is the most important KPI— are users sticking around to use Wealthsimple services after they learn about personal finance?
Learnings
Communication is crucial 🤝
The key was to keep everyone in the loop at all times, delegate, and play smartly into everyone's strengths and weaknesses.
Manage time wisely 🕒
During this project, I had to prioritize tasks effectively and know to discard an idea if it is simply not feasible to complete during the given time frame.
Introspection 💭
I'm a perfectionist to a fault— this project was lesson in compromising and knowing when to let go of ideas in favor of moving forward.