🏆🏆 Grand prize winner for 2018 Bitcamp FINRA Design Challenge. 🏆🏆
1. THE DESIGN CHALLENGE
Protecting Investors Through Life
Investors come in all shapes, sizes, and ages. FINRA's mission is to protect all investors, whether a person is just entering the workforce or one who is well into retirement. Your challenge is to design an investor education product for a specific audience. To help get you started, we've brought 3 personas: a college student, a 30-something in the midst of a career, and an upcoming retiree.
Challenge from FINRA: http://technology.finra.org/articles/bitcamp.html
Team member: Vijit Bhati, Solace Francine Sabado and Jessica Yuan
Project duration: April 8-9, 2018 (36 hours)
Design Challenge: Design an investor education product for young professionals.
Persona Choice: Billy the “Young Professional” (provided by FINRA)
WHY THIS PERSONA?
We decided to design for Billy because we resonate with him the most. We feel his pain points and share his motivations to be financially free. Nonetheless, we designed this app focused on the audience needs, motivations and not on our personal needs which made it extra challenging.
2. DESIGN PROCESS
The road to designing FINFREE
Since we were provided with our personas and our problem, we were fast tracked to the Ideation phase.
HOT IDEAS:
The team did an affinity map which contained 30 hot ideas (10 each member). We categorized them by themes. We then “flagged” 5 ideas each to vote for the idea we liked the most.
STORYBOARDING & MAPPING CUSTOMER JOURNEY:
The team did storyboarding on the whiteboard to understand Bill’s world and create a story on how our product can improve his life and of people like him. This is then illustrated as a customer journey map (below).
LOW FIDELITY PROTOTYPE:
User Flow was translated into rough sketches in order for the team to visualize the screen flow and the placement of important information. We went back to reiterations up until we were satisfied to move to high fidelity prototyping
STYLE GUIDE :
HI-FI PROTOTYPE:
Part 1: Artificial Intelligence (AI) CHATBOT
The chatbot addresses the critical question — How to we get our target audience to download the FinFree mobile application? Our persona Billy is tech savvy and very well connected to various social media platforms. Therefore, having a chatbot that is triggered upon clicking the catchy advertisements on the social media platform addresses the critical issue.
The chatbot is considered AI because it has capabilities of Natural Language Processing (NLP) which is able to understand and interpret the context of responses. The chatbot tone is tailor fit to our target audience: unobtrusive, trustworthy, respectable with the appropriate ounce of amiability.
The chatbot basically does a pre-screening of the user and automatically yields a high-level personalized infographics that puts him in comparison to his peers. He is then prompted to download the application for a more detailed assessment.
Part 2: Mobile app
FinFree is a mobile application that aims to educate and simulate a user’s financial situation with or without an investment. The app has an intuitive interface that follows a workflow that asks the required fields:
1. Age
2. Salary
3. Loans
4. City
5. Risk Appetite
6. Amount he’s willing to invest
The application generates real-time a hypothetical savings and estimated years to be debt-free before and after he makes an investment. The app is smart to derive cost of living figures (tax, housing, food etc.) based on the city input and is also able to update calculations based on the indicated risk appetite.
Furthermore, a bar graph (savings across time) and pie graph (financial proportions) are generated to visualize the data. User’s can “play” with his data (What-ifs) and the projections and visualization are updating real-time to the latest set parameters. Lastly, the app also has educational data regarding various investments a user can make.
