• Research Approach
• Customer Interviews

To better understand the financial challenges that young professionals face, I decided to first dive into customer interviews. By asking open-ended questions, I knew that I could explore and navigate through the different financial concerns they have, what goals they strive for, and what other methods they use to manage their finance outside of their banking applications.

To focus my efforts on young professionals, I recruited participants who were single and did not own a home. They were 25 to 35 years of age, were working professionals, and use their mobile banking applications frequently. I recruited 5 participants and conducted 45-minute to an hour long interviews. Before the interview, I prepared questions to guide the interview. But I anticipated that the participants would have different financial concerns and goals. So I prepared a range of questions and focused on the participant's financial journey.

The goals for my research process was the following:

• Explore and identify patterns of finance management amongst young professionals.
• Identify pain points and unmet needs that current banks/financial services do not address.

As anticipated, all the participants had different financial concerns, habits, and goals. Some participants were struggling to pay down previously accumulated debt, while some were making plans for their future. Regardless of their financial situation, all of the participants were juggling finances paycheck to paycheck and try to set budgets for themselves.

• Four out of five participants all tried to use Mint but found it frustrating and not as helpful as they thought it would be. They thought it would help them manage their finances and budget accordingly. Only one participant it currently using Mint just to keep track of payment due dates and as a general overview of how she's using her money.
  
  Specifically, users were frustrated that Mint would categorize items in the wrong category, they were unable the split the charges, and there would be a lag in the charges. Also users thought they would like managing all the charges. But after a while, they grew tired of keeping up with it. Users also thought they would enjoy the budgeting feature. But the budgeting feature didn't help because every month looked different and it would only alert you once you've reached the limit.
  
• Two participants created their own way of recording their finances via spreadsheet and a list of charges in a notebook. These two participants had specific savings goals and needed to break down their finances to figure out how they could use their money. They also keep track of their payment due dates like this.
• All participants saved based off of their paycheck and outgoing expenses. Some participants keep a log of outgoing expenses to figure out how much they can save and try to set a budget for themselves for how much they can spend. A few participants just put aside a manageable amount aside from each paycheck when they knew they had a large expense coming up.
• Several participants wished that they did not have to keep track of their payment dates. One participant's next financial goal is to have all her payments on autopay. She has been wanting to do this for a while but doesn't full comfortable losing control of her finances that way.

• Persona Development
• Problem Statements

The five participants were all single and did not own a home but varied on financial status, goals, and struggles. Two of the participants were on top of their finances and kept records to keep on track with payments and savings goals. One participant was struggling to pay down her sizable debt for the last 8 years of her life. Another participant did not struggle particularly with debt or strive to reach a financial goal and was content with her financial status as is. The last participant was living paycheck to paycheck but had savings goals and was looking to stabilize her future.

Although the participants varied in financial status, goals, and struggles, they all worked off of their paycheck and did not have any other investments or financial advisors. So I created Jasmine as the key persona to focus on for this feature. She is someone who has some debt, savings goals, and wants to have a better grasp on her finances. Like the participants, she manages her finances paycheck to paycheck. She is looking to make a significant commitment to attend graduate school but needs to save more money and stay on top of her finances.

After conducting the interviews with my participants, I focused my energy on creating "How Might We" problem statements. After composing 18 problem statements, I noticed that there were general reoccurring themes and specific problems that I was interested in tackling.

These are the 3 problem statements I decided to focus on before the Ideation phase:

• How might we show users how they are using their money so that they can understand how they are spending their money?
  
• How might we educate users to prepare for life goals they are actively looking to achieve?
• How might we remind users of their finance goals so that they are able to achieve those goals and not go off track?

• Ideation
• Storyboarding
• User Flow

For the Ideation phase, I utilized the crazy 8 brainstorming exercise. (Crazy 8 brainstorming session entailed 5-minute intervals of 8 sketches with an intentional break of 20-30 minutes. I did not compose 8 sketches each time. But this exercise forced me to push out ideas and I spent the breaks thinking about the ideas I wanted to elaborate on.) This was a great exercise to get my ideas on paper. After doing this exercise 5 times, I compiled my sketches and grouped them according to themes.

For the Storyboarding phase, I also utilized the Crazy 8 brainstorming exercise. This time I used the 8 sketch papers to illustrate how a user would use an idea I had in mind. After 5 Crazy 8 sessions, I decided to focus on the managing by Pay Period feature. During the process, I created 2 different storyboards for this function. It also made the most sense because this is how the participants managed their finances.

After sketching out these storyboards, I decided that I would use the ideas that I generated and create a feature that helps users manage their finances by paycheck period. Within this feature, I wanted to integrate ways users can improve their financial health and manage expenses.

(At this point, I wasn't quite sure what to name the feature. So in the initial design, it started off as the "Money Manager". But after testing the low-fidelity prototype, I renamed this feature as the "Surplus Manager".)

• Usability Test Plan
• Usability Test Findings
• Priority Revisions
• Next Steps

I recruited 4 participants for the Usability Test. Two of the participants were part of the low-fidelity prototype test. During the low-fidelity prototype test, the participant who doesn't use Bank of America was confused because she was not acquainted with its mobile banking app. So I recruited two participants who have not used the Bank of America mobile banking app to test if it would be intuitive for non-users as well.

The task for the users was to use the “surplus manager” feature to change their current $20.00 minimum amount due autopay to pay the full balance ($440.00) for their Bank of America credit card. All the participants were able to complete the task with no problems.

Overall, all the participants really enjoyed this feature. They all mentioned how they wish they could have this feature because it will help them out a lot to keep track of their finances and make it so much easier. All were able to complete the task with ease. Here are a few minor pain points I observed:

• During the payment process, the “Select Amount” section was confusing because the user should be editing the payment from the minimum due to the current balance.
• One new participant was a bit confused at first because she thought the surplus manager summary would show how much money she has at first. But once she understood what was going on, she appreciated the surplus amount because that’s how much money she really has to use for the next two weeks.
• One participant was confused about the “Open Balances” term. But after explaining how that’s the finance term that I found that groups open accounts, she understood.
• While observing the participants, I thought about how I would use this feature and I went back to my initial process of paying the credit card balance in full from the outgoing payments. No one really pointed it out but more of an observation while conducting the test. So I will add this user flow for the revision.

For the revisions, I made a few minor adjustments based off the observations I made during the high-fidelity prototype test. The biggest difference with this revised prototype is that I developed another pathway. When I had initially started the wireframes, I developed a user flow that goes through the outgoing payments. My initial thought was that the user would want to see what's going out. From there, the user will pay off a credit card autopay that's set on minimum payment due.

But after thinking about it, I wanted to highlight the surplus feature and being able to see an overview of their finances as well as open balances and savings. So I changed the user flow. While I was testing this prototype, I thought back to this and decided to make this alternative user flow.

Note: The list of Outgoing Payments is what is already available in the current Bill Pay feature. I added the top portion to filter by pay period and match the other functions of the Surplus Manager.

Now that I developed another pathway for the user to pay down credit card debt using the Outgoing Payments portion, I would want to test this pathway. This pathway provides a more direct route for users to pay down their debt so I would assume users would like this.

Initially, I started out by building out this pathway because it was the way I would instinctively want to pay down my debt. But as I developed this feature, I changed it to encompass a more comprehensive feature that would allow users to also add their savings and see their progress as well as tips to improve their financial health. I would also want to test and see if users like the more simplistic approach or appreciate the more comprehensive approach.