Financial Services for Millennials

Consumer TESTING

We started off with exploratory design consultations with potential customers who fell within a younger target segment. In our sessions we discussed the idea of an ideal financial institution, with probes on products, services, channels of communication, rewards and incentives, brand personality and attitude, etc. Our respondents identified specific things that currently do not exist which gave us a starting point for the ideation process.

Analysis & Research

Our team analyzed the findings from our preliminary consultation sessions and made sure to print and display on our “project wall” any quotes that stood out to us as powerful, interesting or important to the clients’ goal. Along with the findings, we purchased reports and gathered data to use with our preliminary research. We took this information and started to bundle concepts on the wall on Post-its. Once these bundles were formed, we identified primary themes and insight statements which would help us to later form “How Might We” (HMW)  questions.

Ideation Process

To start creating the potential solution we used HMW questions based on our 6 themes and insight statements to frame a full-day brainstorming session. The ideas were transcribed to Post-its, displayed on our project wall, and then sorted into similar groups and themes. I gave each of the participants a role to make sure everyone would be thinking of ideas creatively and from a different lens. The ideation session gave us plenty of features and services to include in our prototype.

Empathy Mapping

Before I could jump into prototyping a solution I needed to know more about the potential end-user. We had interview material on which to base our personas (from our preliminary consultation sessions) but we decided to dive even deeper and for that we ran an empathy-mapping exercise with our stakeholders and some young adults from our client’s team.

Personas

We also discovered during the themes and insights phase that our personas would most likely be evolving from one another, and that they would be based mostly on life-stage rather than age. I designed the personas to have 2 pages each, the first to show who they are as a person and the second to show their financial status and goals.

User Journeys

For each of the personas, a user-journey was created, to show the moments of truth in their journey that would lead to opportunity points for which our solution could provide. I also decided to show the personas’ financial competence as it accumulates over the life-stages. Because these personas were so unique we also wanted to show how their journeys fit together, so I created a complete user journey showing how the personas evolved from one to the next.

Product Journey

To help our client gain interest and funding for the next phase of the project (building the solution) we put together a journey document that followed the proposed product, which called out features and benefits of the product in a real-world scenario. The product’s story also fit within the evolving personas, mentioning features for different life-stages.

Final Presentation & Prototype

Along with the product journey, we created an executive presentation for our client so they could gain further funding This presentation was 100+ slides, with custom graphs, charts, graphics and a visual representation of the product construct that I created to simplify the concept visually, so that any investor could understand how the product would work. I included high-fidelity mock-ups of the product’s mobile screens to further create the realism our client wanted to express to gain further funding.