Overview
For young adults, money is a struggle. Generally, they are overwhelmed, stressed and find finances a challenge they do not want to face. This reality is shaping their current behaviour. They crave support and guidance that helps them do money better to ensure their financial future well-being.
Volt is a product-service-system consisting of a smart phone case and a dedicated app. Through the phone case, you can easily save by clicking a button and check how you are doing financially thanks to a coloured light, located above the button. The dedicated app helps you create digital vaults to budget into your personal goals, it gradually teaches you about finances and puts you together with people with a similar money lifestyle.
Role
Project lead, UX Researcher, UX & Service Designer, Strategist
Date
Jul 2019 - Jan 2020
Project
Market & Trend research, Context Mapping, Product Strategy, Service Design, User Experience, Visual Design, Usability Testing
Deliverables
Research Findings, Behavioral Framework, Strategy, Concept Development, Service definition, Wireframes, UX/UI Prototype
Design Process
To design a human-centred-solution, I applied the Double Diamond method, which involves the user throughout the entire process, from an initial phase of discovering and defining the problem until the development and delivery of the solution.
Research & Analysis
The challenge
Money is a key element in people’s overall well-being. Young adults (22 to 37 years old) are behaving very differently towards finances compared to previous generations. They were born into a worse financial situation compared to their parents and grandparents. In addition, they have little trust on financial institutions and no one to turn to for actionable advice. Adults in their twenties and thirties are struggling with money, feeling overwhelmed and lost . A gap in the market was found, where no current solutions fostered long-term behaviors for young adults towards a secure financial future. I wanted to use my skills as a designer to solve this paradigm involving young adults and finances.
Problem framing
The goal of this project is to provide guidance and support for young adults in changing their current money habits so they can ensure their future well-being. This societal issue regarding young adults and money is a shared problem in countries all over the world. For a better understanding, the context was scoped down: the project was based in Madrid, Spain and it was targeted for young adults belonging to this country. Trend Research
The most important emerging behaviours in young adults were studied in depth. Worldwide, new circumstances regarding money are spotted and understood the way those shape the shifting behaviour. Three main trend clusters were identified: digital finances, data first and upcoming values. Digital transformation in our era is trespassing barriers in banking, enabling self-learning through digital tools and humanizing tech to support young people in using it in a daily basis. Special attention was put into the value data would bring in the future, introducing hyper-personalization as the new normal. Upcoming values such as wellness concern and self-awareness were identified. Therefore, as design requirements, the service to be created needed to be digital, enable personalization, and build trust through transparent and trusted relations. Also, it needed to take the intangibility of money into account and ultimately, foster young adults peace of mind through awareness of themselves, now and in the future.
Trend analysis overview
Market Research
A in-depth analysis of the current situation regarding finances was carried out. Main competitors were mapped as well as the best practices regarding features, interaction and content in financial services.
Best practices of current financial services
Behavioural Framework
Ten semistructured interviews were conducted to explore latent needs of young adults in regards to financials.
After qualitative interviews, main insights were withdrawn and young adult’s current money habits and the desired financial behavior for a sustainable well-being were identified and mapped in two frameworks. The transition between both is enabled through the future service.
The current behaviour of young adults regarding money is now purely transactional. The main limitations young adults encounter are impulsiveness, apathy, blindness, mistrust, bias and short-sightedness.
Their relationship with money needs to evolve to relational: where young audlts will be fore-through, motivated, informed, autonomous, balanced and aware of their financials.
The current behaviour of young adults regarding money is now purely transactional. The main limitations young adults encounter are impulsiveness, apathy, blindness, mistrust, bias and short-sightedness.
Their relationship with money needs to evolve to relational: where young audlts will be fore-through, motivated, informed, autonomous, balanced and aware of their financials.
Future Vision
Design Requirements
Insight themes uncovered in the research and analysis phase were turned into design requirements for the final design. These design requirements are important characteristics that the final design should meet in order to be successful.
Ideation & storyboard
Outcome
Volt is a service consisting of a smart phone case and a dedicated app. Through the phone case, young adults can easily save by clicking a button and check how you are doing financially thanks to a coloured light, located above the button. The dedicated app helps young adults create digital vaults to budget into your personal goals, it gradually teaches them about finances and puts them together with people with a similar money lifestyle.
Onboarding & Application
The Phone Case
The phone case serves two functions: the button enables the user to save money and the light gives him/her insight into their current financial status
Technical specifications of the phone case
Branding
"Volt" references to the word Vault which is a place where people used to saved their most precious goods, in this case would be money as a means to achieve what young adults desire most in life.
Volt helps young adults to achieve what matters most to them by ensuring a future sustainable financial well-being through a better money management and fostering saving behaviour.
Lessons learned
I learned and grew a lot while doing this project.
The most important lesson was to introduce the users early on, and I’m very glad that I did at the problem stage. We were able to find solutions together and also at the wireframe stage to incorporate their feedback even before the low-fi stage.
