Mirror

Help young adults learn financial literacty by self-reflection

We developed the app Mirror, which helps educate emerging adults with financial literacy by making suggestions on short term financial status and develop good spending habits.

Duration

Aug. 2017 - Dec. 2017

Location

Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA

My Role

Competitive Analysis (lead), Ideation (lead), Interface Design, Pilot Study, User Testing

Collaborators

Jason Paul | Michelle Ma | Tony Jin

Research Method

Literature Review, Competitive Analysis, Interview, Survey, Usability Testing

Tools

Balsamiq, Sketch, Invision, Photoshop

overview
overview

Define the users

Literature Review

we conducted a literature review to understand the larger social background of financial education, including the settings where children receive financial education and how well the knowledge is applied. overview

Competitive Analysis

We conducted a competitive analysis of products on financial literacy education. The products mostly focus on saving allowance and budgeting and parents usually play a monitoring role instead of teaching. We also find that if a product attempts to include more educative content, it becomes less user-friendly and less intriguing as well, which can be a potential design space for us to explore. Besides financial apps for children, we also learn from features of financial apps for adult.

process

Survey & User Interview

Purpose

Since we only have limited time and interview resources, we sent out the survey first because it is the guaranteed resource to get large amount of data and it helps us refine our quesitons in our precious interviews.

Key information
  • Parents' attitude towards financial literacy education
  • Children's attitude towards learning financial literacy
  • Financial concepts parents consider important for their children
  • The difficullties parents encountered
Conclusion

We find that parents think it's extremely important for children to learn financial literacy but lack methods and tools. However, young children lack interest in learning financial literacy. The top two financial concepts parents want their children to learn most are Price vs. Value and Budgeting.

Expert Interview

Purpose

Since we don't have professional knowledge in financial education, we conduct two expert interviews. Besides being expert in the personal financial education space, they are also parents with teenage children, so we interviewed them from two aspects.

Key information
  • Interview them as parents
  • Learn from their ways of financial literacy education
  • Get feedback on our findings and discuss possible directions
Conclusion

The experts give us great insights on education methodology. Usually they ask children to learn by practicing. They also point out one important factor: Children's interest in financial management will suddenly grow as soon as they leave home and enter college, where they start to face real life problem.

Affinity Diagramming

Concept Ideation

Brain Storming

process

Brain stoming procedure. Red lines represent the final four concepts we choose.



Concept 1
Target users

Young adults (19-25)

Key idea

Ask users to reflect on their purchases regularly to help them identify decision patterns like impulsive buying and make better purchase decision in the future.

Rationale
  • The Price vs. Value of a product is largely personal
  • Impulse buying usually leads to expenses not accounted for in one’s budget.
  • Feedback in context helps people to remember (Psychology).
Concept 3
Target users

High school children with parents

Key idea

Provide guidelines for parents to co-plan family budget with their children.

Rationale
  • Parents lack methodology in educating children about money (lit review & surveys)
  • Children want agency. They like to be in control for some money. (expert interview)
  • Children like to learn by doing (expert & user interview)

Concept 2
Target users

Young adults (19-25)

Key idea

Bring distant financial concepts closer by (1) encouraging them to set long term saving goals (2) visualizing the long-term financial status based on current financial status.

Rationale
  • Budgeting is the No.1 concern for most parents based on interviews (user interview & surveys)
  • There’s a long term impact for saving behaviors that people aren’t necessarily aware of right now (expert interview)
Concept 4
Target users

High school children with parents

Key idea

Help children learn financial practice by actively rewarding certain amount of money if they successfully accomplish tasks of financial management.

Rationale
  • A lot of children want to spend money as soon as they get it. Delayed gratification skill practice. (expert & user interview)
  • Positive Reinforcement helps (psychology)

Sketch Feedback

To narrow down our user group and improve our concepts, we draw out sketchs for the 4 final concepts and conducted interviews.


For concept 1, users main feedbacks are:

  • Lack of motivation to do it everyday
  • Unsure about what to do with the data

As a result, we decide to push notification as incentive and provide suggestions based on users input data.


For Concept 2, users main feedbacks are:

  • Financial goals have vastly different time horizons, difficult to compare
  • Doubt reliability of long term predictions
  • Long term goals stress people out

As a result, we decide to focus on short term financial status first.


Concept 3 and 4 received some positive feedback, but generally users think the tasks we create lack novelty and can be done outside our tool. Also, considering about the IRB restriction on interviewing children, we decide to focuse on revised concept 1 and 2.

Design

Design Overview

Information Architechture
Data visualizations that provide users with summary of their spending facts, together with relevant insights and advices.
A timeline of purchasing history. Enable users to view previous self-reflections of each purchase as well as add new reflections.
All self reflection cards that require user’s actions. user will also be able to access this module from system level push notifications.
Personal financial information, customization of summary charts in Insights and self-reflection in Reflections and Action Center, etc.

Information Architechture

Information Architechture Information Architechture

Wireframe

Information Architechture

Interface & User Flow

View spending summary and Complete reflections
user flow
View past reflections
user flow
Push notification and settings
user flow

Prototype

Evaluation

Pilot Study

user testing
Observation 1

Participants spent longer time (9 minutes) to explore the system than expected (2 mintues). During the exploration, the participants asked many questions about the system, which are not related to the tasks in operation level, but was key to understanding the tasks they are going to accomplish.

Analysis

Reasons for longer system exploration time

  • It's the first time participants interact with our app, but the state of the app include existing data involved for the purpose to illustrate how our function would work.
  • The topic and concepts are instrinstically complex.

Our tasks are complex but not necessarily difficult

  • Participants reported that the tasks are easy to operate but they need time and effort to understand and learn.
  • The completion rate of the 4 tasks was 100%.
  • In the SUS evaluation, their answers to “I found the system unnecessarily complex” are “neutral” and “slightly agree”, while their answers to “I though the system was easy to use” are “agree”.
Things to change

Provide a tutorial before asking participants to accomplish the task

  • Participants need to amass some easy to acquire but app specific knowledge in order to perform the tasks.
  • It could actually exist in the final application in the form of the guided “quick start” tutorial overlays that are increasingly common for smartphone applications today
Observation 2

Participants reported they didn’t understand why they should perform the same set of tasks again after a five minutes break. They completed the tasks fluently without wrong clicks or redundant steps in general. Also, the task completion time reduce drastically during the second round.

Analysis

The learnability task is too easy

  • The time in between is too short so their memory are fresh.
  • The tasks are not changed during the second round
  • Due to the limitation of an Invision prototype, users can easily guess and remember the procedure with hints.

It is still necessary to measure learnability

  • It would be ideal to let the participants test the app again after a longer time period, but it’s not practical due to the time frame.
Things to change
  • Ask users to complete the SUS evaluation and questionnaire about user purchasing habits during the break between the two rounds of tasks.
  • Change the task slightly in the second round.
  • Explain the purpose of the second period of tasks to the participants to reduce confusion.
  • Not measuring and compare the completion time between the two rounds.
  • Add a follow up question to ask the users to rate on a likert scale on their ability to complete the tasks faster in the second round.

User testing

Detailed interview procedure can be found here. user testing

Reflection

user testing

Insight Tab

Issue 1: Some users were confused about whether the emotional category of the product (e.g. Necessity vs. Treat Yourself) is decided by the system or inputted by the user.

Solution: Add a tutorial when users first use the app to perform a self-reflection.

Issue 2: Some users voiced that there is too much text on the insights page.

Solution: Only provide an one-line suggestion for each recommendation presented in this page.

Issue 3: Some users mentioned that the wording of the suggestions might sound controlling and need to be refined, though they are open to recommendations that are phrased properly.

Solution: Try to rephrase the recommendations, though it is not the core issue of our project.

Reflection Tab

Issue 1: The “required action” filter seems confusing to several users. Some users expect those cards to take them to the action center, where they can complete the required actions.

Solution: Delete the “required action” filter in the reflection tab. Add a list view option to action center, so that the users can see a list (timeline) of all the cards that need to be filled out.

Issue 2: User mentioned that she’d like to see more information on the reflection timeline itself.

Solution: Design a color scheme that corresponds to the 5 emojis that represent user’s feelings about a product. Color code all the cards in the timeline to indicate whether the user is satisfied with the purchase or not. Iteratively test the color code and A/B test the version with color coding against the current one without color coding.
user testing
user testing

Action Center Tab

Issue 1: Several users were confused about which buttons are clickable on the reflection card.

Solution: Change the UI design.

Issue 2: People were confused about why we asked them when they’ll start using the product. Some didn’t notice the field at all.

Solution: Explain the start date into the tutorial, which is shown during people’s first reflection. Move the start date field to a more prominent location and potentially increase its size.

Issue 3: Some users are confused about the difference between factual and emotional categories.

Solution: Remove factual categories from reflection cards. Keep only emotional categories if available.

Issue 4: The wording of the questions are confusing to several users.

Solution: Rephrase the question.

Settings Tab

Issue 1: Some users mentioned that there’s a lot of content on the settings page.

Solution: Change the UI design so that on each page, each section’s title clearly indicates what’s in that section, and that it is clear that the detailed settings in each section appear to be in the same group. We can achieve this by giving the same background color to detailed settings under the same tiatle, and increase the distance between detailed settings under different titles.

Issue 2: Some users don’t understand what a day, a week, and a month mean when customizing the notification timing by category.

Solution: Change “a day” to “after a day”, etc. Change “Customized by category” to “Customize Notification Timings”
user testing