Discipline
User Research, Product Design, Interaction Design, Product Thinking
Timeline
Feb - May 2020
For
SoFi Design Team
Role
Contracted Product Design Consultant
Team
Zoya Razzak
Kamya Venkatesan
Ajia Grant
Mattin Delavar (mentor)
Tools
Figma, Illustrator
Summary
SoFi is a global digital finance company that provides loan refinancing, mortgages, personal loans, investing and banking. They challenged Berkeley Innovation, a student-run design consultancy at Berkeley, to find a product opportunity within their app to help US college students get their money right.
Our solution was SoFi Steps: an interactive goal timeline that helps users visualize and meet their financial goals with adaptive data-driven recommendations. The feature is now a high priority in their product roadmap.
As the synthesis lead for this project, I guided the team to take research and consolidate them into key insights, personas, journey maps, and guiding principles. I also contributed in conducting interviews, ideation, designing wireframes, prototyping and pitching.
Problem
From generative research from 126 survey respondents, ten interviews and six competitive product analyses, we saw that:
Students want to achieve financial independency after college, but are lost about where to start.
College students find themselves anxious about their future, given they have to figure both career and financial plans right after graduation. Students are also often intimidated by complicated topics and struggle to budget their money despite having adequate tools. Hence, tackling financial independency is put after thinking about their career.
Core Experiences
We designed SoFI steps: An in-app personalized, virtual roadmap that guides users on a journey to achieve financial independence for student’s lives and beyond. It recommends necessary SoFi resources and sets manageable goals to help with each stage of their journey. See our creative process after!
Visualize your financial goals
Be recommended a suggested path of steps based on spending habits and on-boarding.
Most recent goals are placed in front, focusing users on one goal to reduce being overwhelmed.
Catered to your preferred views
Zoom out to view progress holistically or toggle between journey and list views, based on what you like.
Look closer at each step
Track your progress, set up personalized tasks, and learn tips from SoFi for each step. This gives students knowledge to tackle bigger financial topics that they have shied away from before.
Keep yourself in check.
Non-intrusive notifications may appear as modals within the app at critical stages, such as when the student has overspent, and request to alter the goal metrics to suit your current habits. This allows students to slowly gain financial confidence.
You did it!
Once completing a goal, a congratulatory message appears for the student to feel proud of their accomplishments, and see themselves getting closer to financial independence, something they could not do so before.
See your friends achieve their goals.
Students are free to share their achievements and ask questions to keep each other accountable and motivate growth. We often found that students are easily influenced by their peers, hence this social feed. However, we kept numbers hidden for financial anonymity.
The posts also act as touch points for different SoFi applications and learning courses.
Look at your progress.
At the top of the step view, students can access holistic reports to understand their progress towards financial goals.
View how other people approach financial independence.
Curious students can view anonymized general journeys of different demographics, showing them how others are approaching their financial journeys. Through doing so, they have the flexibility to add these goals to their own journeys, and learn from each other.
The Process
Background & Context
SoFi, launched in 2011, has products for borrowing, saving, spending, and investing and protecting money to give their one million members tools to get their money right. However, much of their products are targeted towards those early in their career to help them plan for late-career or retirement. Thus, they saw an opportunity to diversify their target market for college students, who precede those in the early career stage.
The SoFi application, from SoFi’s website.
SoFi approached Berkeley Innovation with this opportunity with the project team being students in mind. Thus, the goal was to conduct research on the specific financial needs of college students, and pitch and design hero images for a solution to help get students money right. The constraints was that it feasible to be built in the near future, align with SoFi business goals of expansion, and a product that would fit within their SoFi ecosystem.
Research
Goals & Hypothesis
Our main goal was to find out how students get their money right, and after brainstorming, we decide to focus on
Asking students to their definitions of "getting their money right".
What are the students’ relationship with money.
What the students’ financial goals, needs, pains points, and confusions are, including topics of budgeting, investing, spending, and literacy.
Existing products or plans exist to help students figure out how to manage their money.
Our hypothesis was that students are not as financially equipped with the knowledge and confidence as they move into post-grad, given our own experiences as students.
Methods
Survey - 126 respondents
We found that many participants frequently worry a lot about their financial future, and have little confidence in their own money management skills.
Competitive Analysis - 6 studies
We noted that while students enjoy apps like Robinhood and Mint because of their organized and easy-to-navigate interfaces, as well as unique features, budgeting tools, and e-trading, they are only used by a few students because it still leaves them wondering with financial uncertainty given a lack of targeted resources.
Interviews - 10 participants
We found that students want control over their financial journeys and habits, but lack the confidence and knowledge to do so as they find financial topics daunting or have no clear mental idea of how they are doing.
Synthesis
Affinity Mapping & Key Insights
To consolidate findings, we conducted an affinity map to steer in a specific problem space. We focused on drawing out salient student habits and bucketing insights into different topics to see areas students want help with.
only 1/3 of our entire board!
Thus, we drew out these four points.
The main insight was that getting students money right is about achieving financial independency. The other insights helped us confirm our hypothesis that students are not financially confident, given their low financial literacy, and budgeting / overspending struggles.
Design Requirements
Thus, our main design challenge was to find out how might we help students achieve financial independency through SoFi. Our product also needed to, based on our insights and constraints:
Ideation
Creative brainstorm
Through several rounds rapid ideation from How Might Wes, Creative Matrixes and combining ideas we resulted in four main concepts. We focused on generating innovative ideas that utilized machine learning, in line with SoFi's Auto-investing feature that personally suggest which stocks to invest into. The four are:
We chose SoFi Steps after discussion with the clients. There was greater business opportunity in Steps compared to the other solutions as it could easily integrate and promote the other SoFi products, and encourage long-term customer loyalty right at the start. Furthermore, it would inform prospective users which SoFi products to use at the right time. It also gives a holistic vision of their journey compared to the other solutions, which are more minute in their influence.
Design Explorations
Through these sketches, we experimented the novels ways we could visualize journeys of independence, and what actions students can take from them.
Iteration
Mid-fidelity
Our initial ideas of journey visualization were immersive and were akin to physical treks. In the next round of iterations, we decided to go with less immersive experiences to be in line with SoFi's visual design, and reduce visual complexity for both implementation and the user.
User feedback
From our user testing with five students via UserTesting.com, they loved the idea of the visualization of their journeys and the different synthesis of financial data, but wished for greater flexibility and clarity in the types of views visible. They also raised concerns on the feasibility of a social feed and global insights given the lack of definition on what information is to be public.
From this, we added the alternative list view, and limited the data shown on social feed to non-quantitative achievements. Thus, after visual design edits and incorporating user testing feedback, we pitched SoFi steps with the greater SoFi team, with intention on implementation. Currently, our ideas are embedded into their product roadmap.
Wishes
More user testing.
Given the time constraints, we only had one round of user testing. It would be helpful to continue to user-test our high fidelity prototypes to see whether these types of visualizations and suggestions make sense for the user.
Investigate different visualizations.
We saw through our user-testing that people prefer to read financial information in different ways, thus it would be useful to investigate other ways to represent steps and goals.
With my SoFi Consulting team!
Learnings
How to think and execute within a product ecosystem
On many projects I have previously done, I did not have the chance to work within a large corporation’s design and product system. Thus, I learnt to also consider business value, feasibility, and product value for other users. Also, working with senior designers from SoFi also challenged us to create visuals that very much looked like with their products.
Designing for personal finance has its own challenges.
People are sensitive about their personal finance. So, designing to make people feel confident, secure, and comfortable with their money means thinking empathetically and altruistically.