Financial Management Platform
User Research project
OVERVIEW
This project is about to understand our users, it involves developing a sense of empathy towards the people that we are designing the product for. It allows us to put ourselves in users' shoes to better understand their pain points, fears, needs, dreams, and goals, etc.
The goal of this project is to define statements of intent for meaningful user outcomes, which guide a team's alignment toward a common understanding of the outcomes that are needed to meet user needs.
Role /
Sr. UI Designer | Money101
Design Thinking, User Research
Team /
1 Designer (me), 1 Design Intern, 1 Product Manager
Duration /
3 months
Year /
2020
The Problem
CompareAsiaGroup is Asia's leading financial management platform helping users to empower their financial lives. And Money101 is one of the country based in Taiwan. At the beginning of 2020, Money101 has launched CRM system allowing users to sign up and login in order to provide more sophisticated user experience for users to onboard our platform.
Current Money101 served as a financial comparison platform and a portal that display all the information, and led users to apply for any product by click the apply button. We know little about our user, their needs, and don’t know how we can improve their buyer’s journey.
Company’s Core Value
To empower people to build healthier financial lives
Jumpstarting Research
The first part of the research, we chose to focus on the users (end-users) stakeholders first is because one of the company’s most important value is to put its users first. Additionally, Money101 is a consumer-facing platform, and our company’s vision is to empower our users to build healthy financial lives.
Set objective
Set goals at the beginning of the project in order to have an exact and practical way of improve
Collect data
1. Conduct user research by interviewing with internal users
2. Select qualified interviewees via questionnaires
3. Conduct user research by interviewing qualified interviewees
Analyze data
Analyze the interview results by producing persona, empathy maps, and as-is scenarios
Define final outcomes
Define final statements, personas, empathy maps, and as-is scenarios
Interviews & Empathy Mapping
Takeaways:
The same user might be represented by a different persona in different verticals because a persona is determined by his/her experience in each vertical, knowledge in each vertical, personality, habits, fears, needs, dreams/goals, pain points, and actions
If we know which persona a user belongs to in a certain vertical, we can most likely determine the user’s buyer’s journey for that vertical
Generating Personas
Financial illiterate
Intermediate Planner
Proactive Planner
Identify Target Audience
Currently, Money101 has ~2 million monthly visitors on average. Out of these visitors, there are around 150 thousand active users (i.e., users who subscribe to the Money101’s social media). Around 80% of active users are intermediate planners and financial illiterates across all product lines.
As a result, the intermediate planner (Audrey) is identified as our primary target audience because her behaviors are very similar to the current active users. In addition, these active users are our early adopters and are more likely to be our sponsor users throughout the product development process.
Financial illiterate (Tina) is identified as our secondary target audience because current platform (i.e., result page style of comparison) doesn’t quite fulfill her desire for trusted recommendations.
Proactive planner (James) is identified as an influencer rather than the target audience because it is quite difficult to convince him to use the third- party platform to apply for financial/insurance products. However, he could become a asset as a KOL if Money101 manages to gain his trust, people like James can help expand our reach to a broader audience.
Define the User Outcomes
After we identify the primary and secondary target audience based on their persona, empathy maps, and as-is scenarios. We have made three statements for both intermediate planner and financial illiterate.
The recommendation is to focus on personalized recommendation first, since they both have the goal of obtaining trusted recommendations, but with different goals in their buying journey. If we can offer trusted personalized recommendations that are both quick and secure, it can satisfy both primary and secondary target audiences, which will covers 80% of our active users.