fINEQUITY is a seed-stage nonprofit committed to advancing the financial futures of community members who have experienced long-term incarceration by empowering them through education and access to safe financial products as part of their reentry journey.
My Role
Working with three other designers, I contributed to the full process: research, design, prototyping, and testing, with a focus on a new educational feature.
Tools
Zoom & Google Meet
Figma
Miro
Overview
The Client presented the team with a marketing website and their current paper process and asked us to design a platform to provide a mobile-friendly digital experience for education, micro-loans, and credit building services geared toward people who are credit invisible due to long-term incarceration. We basically had a blank slate.
User Flow
Given the scope of what the client was asking for and the time constraint of 3 weeks to deliver, the team divid up the work, each of us taking on an area of focus. My job - find an engaging way to educate the user on making financial decisions given that they may or may not have had the opportunity to make financial decisions for an extended period of time and in some cases, ever.
The result was the "Simulator", a gamified learning activity based on presenting users with common financial decision-making scenarios, giving the user the freedom to learn by doing.
Linked key terms give the user quick access to definitions without having to leave the application
Who else is doing it? (Competitive Analysis)
Before jumping into the solution, I researched the competitive landscape and found a lack of focus on users within the target population. Expanding the search, I compiled a list of sites offering financial education and others on micro-loans, the two main goals of the business, and kept these in mind as inspiration for my design process.
User Interviews
With an understanding of the business goals, we gained insights into the user's needs by conducting phone interviews with people who had experienced long-term incarceration and had rejoined society.
Key Takeaways
They need access to basic credit education that is practical
They are faced with making decisions after being removed from society for 7+ years and trying to move forward without trustworthy guidance, not knowing where to go for help.
They need a mechanism to build credit
Learning about credit was important to them, but understanding how to navigate the credit building process and building it safely were key for our team to focus on.
Ideation & Sketching
We started the ideation phase by taking what we learned from research and brainstormed ideas for potential solutions. Sketching ideas for log in, creating an account, goal setting, and modules, there was so much to do and so little time.
Going back to research, I revisited financial education tools in the market, and was inspired by a concept that was centered on learning by doing. We discussed the importance of engagement and how to bring value to the educational piece to this puzzle and decided that the only way we would know for sure would be to put it to the test.
With ideas on paper, we came to an agreement on a flow and how the UI should be structured for the next phase, mid-fi wireframes to test and validate our solutions.
Simulator Start Page
Simulator Decision
Simulator Decision
Testing identified the simulator as a viable educational tool, however, more research and testing would be required...
What I learned
In retrospect, the scope of work was a tall order for the time we had to complete the project, and knowing what I know now, I believe our approach, although filled with good intention, did not necessarily meet the MVP objectives the client was looking for. Nonetheless, the team worked tirelessly and to the best of our ability, we created a strong foundation for the client. It would have benefited us to zoom out and focus on the basic framework of the application based on the existing material the client was working with. The simulator did meet the objective of adding a feature to educate and engage the user, and if given more time, it would have been interesting to test the traditional information/quiz method they were using to compare with the simulator. We went too in-depth with features. The client wanted us to flesh out possible features, but given that they didn't have anything to start with, it would have been more useful to them if we focused more on the system vs each individual part. It was an ambitious start, and if I had to do it again, I would have focused more on the broad strokes that house each feature instead of tackling the system and the details as a whole.