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Mint: A Case Study
Design Project (Fall, 2019)
UC San Diego (COGS 127 – Data Driven UX/Product Design)
As part of UC San Diego's "Designing Human-Data Interactions" course, I was tasked in a team of three to extend or redesign a feature that helps a specific type of user to save for a major upcoming high-cost purchase.
Within the ten-week time frame of the course, our team learned about the
UX/product design process that included need finding, competitive audits, and
high-fidelity prototyping.
My main roles in this project were:
- to keep the project as realistic as possible by gathering as much user feedback as I can find
- aid in high-fidelity prototyping as I am terrible at hand sketching but adept at digital design.
- manage competitive analysis/audits to shape our design as a form of regression testing
I view these three roles as very important especially the one with the competitive analysis and auditing because change within the design process happens very often; it tends to cover up our old decisions and the reasons why the decisions were essential in the first place.
By extending the Mint app, our team hopes to further motivate young students to be more active in saving money.
Our team has decided to use young students as our target user. We believe the younger generation of students are an ideal target user because students should learn at a younger age to start saving money whether it would be for big or small purchases; this would allow saving money to grow into a beneficial habit.
By using our feature, our users should be able to:
- successfully save for a major purchase
- consistently stay motivated throughout their saving towards the purchase
- minimize other needless spending / expenditures
- fully enjoy their major purchase after saving up for it
"Young students especially those who are interested in personal finance need to be more motivated when using personal finance apps to promote a more active effort towards saving money."
At some point in their life, everyone experienced having a flow of income for their first time. For many, it can be overwhelming. But as time goes on, we all realize that a little effort done periodically can go a long way. Setting money aside to gradually accumulate for certain purchases would ensure a more active/flexible way of saving money. It can be extremely effective, fun, and simple. It is easy to become demotivated from constantly checking bank applications or money management apps like Mint. Such applications are very general and stationary in financial planning, and do little besides just listing numbers. With a lighthearted money saving app focused on achievements and user satisfaction, the biggest issue in money management will be tackled: motivation. Since Mint is one of the most popular apps for young adults to be managing their personal wealth, we chose to extend this feature onto it. Therefore, our project aims to help youths via Mint learn to manage their money and to keep them motivated consistently to save up for a high-cost purchase.
Before we started to design our feature, we conducted a survey on the local
student population through a Google Form that was sent out to popular UCSD
Facebook pages. We figured a survey would preserve anonymity so people would
not
have to associate their financial habits with their identities. Our survey process also allowed us to gain an understanding of not just students, but also teens
and young adults with their first jobs.
The major findings of our survey are summarized below:
1.) Students have good control over their money, yet they often do not commit to saving periodically for large purchases
- Feeling overwhelmed by money
- Not being motivated enough
- Difficult to keep track of savings for specific purchases
- Not knowing if the end goal is ever going to happen
2.) Students are discouraged when trying to save up.
- Many banking or money management apps simply list numbers of how much the user has spent, so it is up to the user to constantly check back on the app to see their savings.
- Many apps just flood the user with a lot of notifications which tire and eventually annoy the user.
- Throughout the process of saving, the user does not feel a sense of price or accomplishment at how much they have saved so far.
3.) Students do not have a structured way of saving their money for specific purchases.
- Most students “saved” up by simply keeping their goal in mind when spending.
- It is easy to lose track of how much the user has actually saved, versus what they recall and believe they saved.
"It is a process, not something dreamt overnight!"
The key principle of motivation in money management was inspired by the innovative features offered by Mint's competitors [Digit, Qapital Banking, and Acorns(formerly)] and by Mint's pre-existing integrations (Acorns). However, the most important feature for motivation that was absent in all of these apps was an achievement system which was mainly inspired by the language-learning app, Duolingo.
Thus, to gauge how we should improve Mint, we performed a competitive audit and concluded that Mint (along with its integration with Acorns) needed to include an achievement system along with more user-defined goals.
When it came to prototyping, our group created UX flows, UI sketches, low-fidelity paper prototypes, high-fidelity prototypes. This gradual process of prototyping allowed us to evolve our designs while receiving much needed feedback at each stage.
UX Flows
Before we design our feature onto Mint, we had to create UX flows that envisioned how our user was to navigate within the app to either create their goals or to manage their achievements.
Flow 1: Managing User Goals (Click to View)
Flow 2: Managing User Achievements (Click to View)
UX Sketches
After the creation of UX flows, we created UI sketches to either conform to our UX flows or redefine our thought process.
UI Sketches (Click to View)
Low Fidelity Paper Prototypes
Once the UI sketches were completed, it was time to craft our low-fidelity paper prototpyes, these were very crucial for understanding how the user initially went through the app and how certain features were anticipated or hindered their experience. For example, our users were annoyed in the goal details page that the graph did not provide much detail / statistics and that they would have to navigate through two more screens to view that info.
High Fidelity Prototypes
After valuable feedback from users testing our low-fidelity prototpyes, we went on to develop digital high-fidelity prototypes. These high-fidelity prototypes started to show a slight divergence from our UX flows but that is expected as the design process progresses.
After about 10 weeks of this course, I have come to appreciate how the design
process is important to the life cycle of every project. I have felt that
this case study has allowed me to have a hands-on experience in a project's
design lifecycle which in many ways greatly differed from my traditional
background in software devlopment and its own lifecycle, SDLC (software
development lifecycle). For example, the greatest difference I have felt
was the user-testing in this case study. The user-testing was a
lot more frequent and had large sweeping changes on our decisions, sometimes more so
than I was used to in my experience with software development. As we were
developing our design we wanted to give users
more control over the features but this presented too much information to
them; it took us a while until it finally dawned on us that we have lost
sight of the main principle of our feature, motivation. How could an app
be motivating if the user is expected to be very specific and if they
would treat using the app like a chore? Our A/B testing using the
original Mint app and our design exposed our users'
frustrations on our design and showed for far we truly departed
from Mint's innate minimalist design. Our latter prototypes were then
changed (somewhat reluctantly) to make our app more minimalist while
retaining the features that truly matter. The end result was fulfilling to
our users and we have appreciated what we have been able to
accomplish. Therefore, this challenge and difficulty we faced is
something truly unique to me that sets the design process as a
different principle that should be carefully conducted and considered in
every project.
In the end, we hoped what we have designed would be a potential and
enjoyable solution to the problems described in
our project statement and we believe most if not all of our objectives were
reached. I look forward for any opportunity to improve this project and
more opportunities to test this project.