MoneyMate
Smart budget planning for international students who struggle to manage money in a foreign country.
Industry
Finance & Business
Project duration
6 weeks
Project type
Industry Project with Deloitte Digital UK
MoneyMate is a financial product designed for Deloitte Digital UK. With Deloitte as our client, the team was given a brief by the financial and UX design team to work on. The whole process is highly autonomous and we met the client weekly for updates and iterations. Within the 6 weeks, we set off from user research to defining the scope of the brief, followed by ideation and rounds prototype testing.
The Brief
Putting vulnerable and excluded people at the heart, design a service or product that provides an inclusive and elevated financial experience for international students
FINAL PRODUCT
Chill out, first-timer!
Set a budget plan based on similar users
Get a realistic budget plan by using similar users' plans as benchmark. Just answer a few questions about your habits, location and lifestyle and you are ready to start.
Guard your year-long budget
Perfomance insights
Understand your spending performance and distribution at a glance.
Receive reminder when overspent
Provide a better picture of your money allocations across a year-long period.
Centrum of your finance
Auto expense recording
Connect all your bank card to MoneyMate, and we will automatically record and categorise your expenses. No more unknown transactions, no more mundane processes!
DEFINING THE BRIEF
Data collection methods
After secondary research, we conducted guerrilla interviews and semi-structured interviews to study the financial pain points and needs of full-time international students to identify opportunities that may improve their study abroad experience.
Data analysis process
Key insights
Getting multiple cards at different timing cause their finance to be decentralized, making it difficult to track.
They overspend at the beginning because they are unable to anticipate year-long budget for their expenses in advance.
They give up recording their spending easily because they find it repetitive.
Because of the age stereotype, they'd like to feel mindful of their spending to avoid guilt.
DESIGN THE RIGHT THING
We started the ideation process with HMWs based on the key insights we gained from our user research.
We especially focused on the sense of guilt that postgraduate students who are funded by their parents would have. It is because this user group thinks that they should be working and making money instead of spending at their age, which is different from the social stereotype and expectations. Here's a few examples of the other HMWs we generated:
From there, we have decided on our initial UX vision statement.
A initial feature set based on that was designed by doing crazy 8 with the team, where each of us sketched 8 feature ideas within 8 minutes, then regrouped and voted for the best 3-4 to be included in the product.
Initial UX vision statement
We believe there's an opportunity to design an app for postgraduate international students funded by their parents who are new to managing money that enables them to budget a year worth of money and track their spending consistently to feel less guilty about not following the age stereotype.
DESIGN THE THING RIGHT
What didn't work?
The features were developed into low-fidelity prototypes and storyboard for testing.
However, users reflected that although they were informed with their spending, it was not necessarily related to their feeling of guilt of spending money instead of earning given that they were expected to start earning money at their age.
We also found out more about what users were looking for, e.g. they would like to have a goal that they want to save money for, which is more motivating than gamification like streaks.
Knowing that our assumption of "being informed of the spending performance can reduce users' sense of guilt" was not right, the team revisited some of our key insights from our primary research and dug deeper into each point in the user experience map.
We found that most international students have never managed such large amount of money before they study aboard, therefore, they found it difficult to manage a year's worth of money.
Features iteration
Shifting the emphasis to empowering users to do long term budget planning, we revised the UX vision statement and iterated the features according to the testing insights.
For example:
-
User will be able to adjust the suggested budget from time to time;
-
Alert will be sent once user overspent, reminding user with the consequences of spending too much;
-
New key feature: user can set a saving goal, e.g. a trip, on MoneyMate, whenever user spent less than the budget of the month, the remaining balance will be moved to fund the goal.
Revised UX statement
We believe there's an opportunity to design an app for international students who are new to budgeting and find it difficult to do long-term planning that enables them to budget a year's worth of money and track their spending consistently to prevent overspending and feel in control.
CHALLENGES & KEY TAKEAWAYS
Working with a group of new teammates is a great challenge in this project. Each of us in the team are from different cultures, working experience level and personality which makes conflicts, hence the honest conversation a treasure under a packed and busy schedule. Reflections among members were done in every internal meeting to ensure team's confidence in making the project a success, more importantly to take care of everyone's feelings and needs while at work.
Key takeaway from here would be:
-
Understanding your team members' personality, strengths and weakness is just a starting point.
-
Having a diverse background means each member can cover each other up, yet it is also important to voice out when you feel burnout.
-
Always balance voices and say from each individual.
-
Open and respectful conversation will never go wrong, silence will.
GALLERY
