gloria
During my final semester, myself and a team of four designers were tasked with creating a digital solution to enable Canadians to be better off financially.
Here's how we did it:
Design Prompt
We were challenged by Scotiabank's FactoryU to create new solutions to help address the ongoing challenges for many Canadians who struggle financially, and enable them to advance beyond living pay-check to pay-check.
Research
Our initial secondary research highlighted the financial difficulties that young adults are facing due extraneous circumstances, lack of financial literacy, and poor spending habits. We then conducted in person interviews to further understand the specifics of the probelm. This allowed us to develop our problem statement: Young adults are overwhelmed and don’t know where to start with investing.
Ideating
Through ideating methods such as reverse thinking, mind-mapping, challenging assumption, word association, and crazy eights, we were able to come up with a variety of ideas to pursue.
Iterations
During the project, we went through several iterations before determining exactly which idea to pursue.
A pair of shoes that tracks the amount of steps a user takes and generates some extra money into an investment portfolio.
An application that rewards users for making good financial decisions by saving a percentage of the money they saved for more frivolous purchases.
A coffee machine that invest the amount it would cost a user to purchase a regular coffee into a personal investment portfolio.
User Personas + Journeys
To ensure that we were designing with the user in mind, we created Chloe, a recent graduate who lives paycheque to paycheque due to her poor spending habits.
Prototyping
To better understand our users and ensure we were meeting their needs, we conducted three roungs of user testing using paper prototypes and a mid fidelity prototype. The feedback we received inspired a variety of changes to our experience, from choice of copy, adding a goals function, and more visual elements for ease of understanding. Our mobile prototype can be seen here and our web prototype can be seen here. This was a key part of my role as I was the main app designer and led the majority of the user testing.
Branding
A major part of my role in this project was determing the branding of our applications. We wanted our brand to feel professional and trustworthy, yet unintimating and friendly, all necessary to ease young adults into investing.
The Solution
Our final product is Gloria, a coffee machine and sister mobile application that invests the price of a cup of coffee into a personalized investment portfolio.
