UX Research & Experimentation for Financial Planning App
@Hyper Island
I had friends with newborn babies who noticed financial issues in their mom groups. They experienced inequality with financials, difficulty in planning and a lack of knowledge how parental leave affects future finances including pension. I wanted to look into this further and develop a financial planning tool to improve knowledge amongst parents with newborn kids to better understand their future finances.
I did this project as part of the Hyper Island UX Upskill program. The focus of this project was experimentation, to verify and falsify hypothesis to move the design project forward. This was the final project in the UX Upskill program and tied everything we have learned together, including design thinking, research and prototyping.
Quote from a user interview
“I know my pension is affected by parental leave but now how much”
Method
Define scope
Make observations to define design scope, formulate hypothesis
Field research
Get insights in survey and interviews to empathise with potential users, verify/falsify hypothesis, map user journey
Concept development
Ideation, concept development, new hypothesis
Concept validation
Test concept with with users. Verify/falsify hypothesis. Define improvements
Research
Sent out one survey and conducted user interviews to answer the hypothesis.
Define
I verified and falsified the hypothesis based on the research result. From the research result I also did affinity diagramming, a user journey and defined design guidlines.
Before the survey and interviews I thought the biggest need was to compensate the pension between the partners. After the research phase I understand there is more need to simply understand how each own pension affects by the parental leave. It turns out this information is really hard to come by today and most people are in the dark. I release there is a potential to improve the experience here. Then, the compensation can be something the user make their own conclusion if they want to.
Design guidelines
Defined following design guidelines to guide the ideation.
Simplicity (easy to use)
Speak to many (regardless of prior knowledge)
Clarity (clear numbers)
Trustworthy (show calculations)
Ideate
Brainstorming and crazy 8 to come up with different ideas.
Concept card
Who is it for?
Parents to a newborn in Sweden or someone expecting a baby.
What are they trying to achieve?
Get a better understanding of the effects on pension due to lack of income for parents in Sweden
What will we offer?
A service to see how the pension is affected by leave taken when becoming a parent.
Sustainability?
Yes sustainable, low impact on environment.
Task flow
Enter financial details
Plan parental leave
Show financial outcome on pension
Wireframes
Concept validation
Formulated new hypothesis to verify or falsify in user interviews to validate the concept.
Hypothesis
We believe this concept is useful to better understand how the pension is affected by parental leave
We believe this approach is easy to understand without a lot of knowledge about pension and that it is simple to use
Conducted user interviews with this ask:
"Imagine a scenario where you want to find out how your pension is affected by your parental leave.
Evaluate the result
Overview improvements
Less detailed input from users. Feedback from the users was that they want add high level plan (weeks ot months instead of planning each day)
Clearer result page to explain how the pension is affected by the planned leave
More informative service than a planning service. Focus more on teaching/ informing the user than create a planning service.
Detailed improvements
We can use the default pension age instead of asking for this.
Separate Parental pay into parental benefit, parental pay ‘top up’ and occupational pension from workplace.
Interface considerations
Investigate if this is its own service or could it be integrated with an existing service (such as Försäkrings kassan/ Min pension etc)?
Should it be a mobile application or desktop?
Reflection
This project was a great experience to work through the different stages in design process. I am happy that I took the opportunity to work on something I felt strongly about. Teaming up with a classmate also proved to be very helpful as we bounced off ideas with each-other and our skills complemented each other which helped the experimentation to move forward.
Next in this experimentation I would create low fidelity prototype in Figma in gray-scale with the changes I mentioned above. I would use this protoype to do a usability test, formulate new hypothesis and review the result to continue the design.