Identifying the problem

In the beginning of the project, our team submitted 3-4 ideas each of problems we wanted to try to solve. Some of these ideas included:

• A product that would remind plant parents when to water their plant babies
• Improving how unhoused individuals found jobs without an address
• Finding a new way to educate young adults on financial planning and literacy
• Reimagining a way to pack nutritious school lunches for kids that are easy on the parents and appetizing for the kids

The idea we ultimately chose as a team was finding a new way to educate young adults on financial planning and literacy.

Below is our problem statement.

Students across the country are educated in a variety of subjects, designed to help them build critical life skills. But many educational programs fail these students in one of the most critical areas necessary: financial literacy.

Our team members shared experiences of having to make important financial decisions as young adults – budgeting, retirement, saving, and education financing – yet few of us received any education or training around building these skills.

Given our shared interest in the themes of financial empowerment and social impact, we wondered, “How could we find a new way to educate students on the best practices of preparing for a healthy financial future?”

Performing the research

Our target market was young adults, age 17-30, and so we got to interviewing 2-3 friends or family each. I performed one group interview with two interviewees and attended 2 other single interviews, which I transcribed.

Some of the questions we asked were:

• What is the role of money in your life? How do you view it?
• Walk me through how you last spent your paycheck.
• How has your experience with money changed from when you were a child to a teenager to college to post-college?
• Tell me about a time you made a bad financial decision. What do you wish was different?
• Tell me about a time where you had to do something with your money but didn’t know how to begin or what to do. How did you go about getting help or finding out what to do?
• If you could give a young adult advice on finances, what would it be?

The goal of our questions was to get the users to talk about how they felt about money and understand their relationship to it, focusing on their emotional experiences and practices (if any).

Below are our consolidated need statements where we identified primary needs, secondary needs, and latent needs from 12 Zoom interviews.

Identifying the opportunity

Our research determined that a large portion of our users’ experience with money is negative, described as “stressful”, “overwhelming”, and “confusing.”

We didn’t want to make another app like Mint that performs just functional actions. We saw that our users related to money in a very personable way, where there was shame and guilt attached to “not performing well” when it came to financial progress.

Our opportunity changed from improving financial literacy in young adults to improving young adults’ relationship with money and empowering them to make their own financial decisions without feeling overwhelmed.

Is the opportunity real?

Based on the user needs and competitive analysis, the product idea doesn’t currently exist and would prove to be a differentiated valuable experience. No other financial apps that we found incorporated a mental wellness aspect.

We came up with Happy Wallet, its goal to improve young adults’ relationship with money through personalized services and experiences that keeps mental wellness at the forefront of financial planning.

Some highlighted features of Happy Wallet are:

• Daily affirmations and mental wellness check-ins
• AI-driven “buddies” to coach you through customized financial roadmaps
• On-demand financial advisors you can message, video chat, or text 
• Automated financial actions so you can set it and forget it
• Custom learning plans via articles, bite-sized videos, and exercises based on financial goals
• Dashboards and reports of the progress of your overall wealth
• An online community for users to join and encourage one another
• Third-party integrations with banks and other financial service platforms 

Can it win?

I came up with the idea of having a “financial buddy”, similar to Clippy from the old MS Word days.

The goal of the financial buddy is to have a non-threatening guide that would walk a user through personalized learning plans, help allocate money into different buckets to reach goals, affirm and encourage users daily, and connect users to real financial advisors when needed.

Each buddy had a different journey they could take the user. Some concepts are shown below.

We also brainstormed 3 ways to improve (add value to) the experience for each innovation opportunity.

Opportunity 1: Interact with buddy

• Improvement A: Receive support from a live expert 24/7 via texting 
• Improvement B: Chat with an automated bot that has pre-filled questions and answers within the app
• Improvement C: Chat with AI support that can provide recommendations based on user data within the app

Opportunity 2: Reach financial goals

• Improvement A: Provide trend analysis with customizable dashboards and reports over time that showcase a user’s goal performance using the app
• Improvement B: Schedule a check-in meeting with a live professional when user reaches 75% of the goal to ensure user reaches the goal
• Improvement C: Receive automatic push and email notifications when user is under or over financial goal

Opportunity 3: Advertise

• Improvement A: Partner with schools to integrate app within curriculum/summer program/enrichment
• Improvement B: Pop up/banner ads on financial education/information websites
• Improvement C: Free trial offer with bank account services through partnered financial institutions (ex: Chase, Bank of America, etc.)

Is it worth it?

We conduced an NPV analysis to decide how to make our profitable, when it would become profitable, and if it would be profitable.

The revenue model was decided to be a free monthly subscription app/website service with paid premium options. Users could access premium features for an annual $40 membership fee, with add-ons such as on-demand financial advisors, custom learning plans, and buddy customization options.

Our NPV analysis concluded that Happy Wallet was worth $7 million with a 7% discount rate, with assumptions of $1.25M development cost, $1.2-$1.5M in annual business cost, and 1.5% market reach (market size of 30 million and 20% of market are estimated to be premium users.

Business Recommendations

Based on our analysis, we recommended to move forward with the product but needed to do more user testing and validation to see the public reception of the product. 

Happy Wallet has the potential to be profitable and possibly acquirable — there are not a lot of competitors in the space that currently merge fintech and mental wellness.

Some questions we needed to consider before moving forward were:

• How do we design our product to reduce negative environmental impact?
• Are there laws and regulations that may prevent us from moving forward with this app as it relates to financial services?
• Does our product actually help users reduce their negative perspective of financial planning and how do we measure that?
• How do we measure a user’s “improvement in relationship
  with money”?
• How long of a duration do we need to track each user’s usage of the app to determine the app’s features as a success?

Reception

Our project was one of three projects selected to move forward to the final round out of 40+ teams. We presented to Steven Eppinger and received extremely positive feedback.

Unlike other teams, we were able to successfully withhold solutioning too early, apply the user interviews to ideate a product that solved a specific problem and not all possible problems, and provide realistic financial analyses.

What I learned

My biggest takeaways from this program was how to apply user research and feedback properly in a product design setting. In the marketing sphere, I’m used to coming up with one strategy at a time and testing each strategy as time went on. For example, if I see that conversion is low for one ad set, I’ll modify a button’s color or text and test it against another sample. The risk and cost of iterations is extremely low compared to product design.

Whether it’s physical or digital product design, you’re first conducting interviews, then finding what problems they’re facing explicitly and implicitly, prioritizing the needs, and not providing a solution right off the bat. By waiting and seeing what the users are saying, there is reduced guesswork of what problems the user could be facing. The risk and cost of iterations is higher because iterations have much more layers. With digital products, designers have to redo wireframes and prototypes. With physical products, physical prototypes can be costly. There’s also the consideration of environmental impact as well.  Most of the time, the first solution won’t be the final solution. And solutioning too early on in the process may waste time, effort, and money down the road.

Applying user research in the product design sphere helped me switch my way of thinking about analytics. I’m not just looking at numbers — I’m looking at real people’s interactions with our products, whether it’s a webpage, a flyer, or a chat with a customer service agent. Without proper user research, teams are wasting resources. And with proper user research and design thinking, companies can execute product and service innovations that are actually desired by customers, technically feasible and viable from a business perspective.