User-Centered Research

Team: Meixuan Li, Serena Wang, Joanna Miao, Qijia Li
My Role: Project Manager, User Researcher

This project aims to create a solution that can enable better support now so that when the time comes, the next generation of homebuyers possess the financial literacy and awareness that can affect their ability to purchase. The project entails five research phases to guide product development: background research, think-aloud for generative research, contextual inquiry, speed dating, and experience prototyping.

Project Plan

Background Research

We made stakeholder and journey maps to understand the house-buying process. Then, we explored a breadth of house buying related resources through experiential research and informational research.

Based on background research, we defined our area of focus on empowering and educating university students about making smart financial decisions through an interactive experience.

Think-Aloud for Generative Research

We conducted four generative competitive think-aloud studies on financial aspects of house buying. We used existing technology that help users make financially-sound decisions to learn about users and had each participant follow a series of tasks that engaged them in different aspects to analyze house buying decisions financially.

We observed that users showed confusion navigating the tools. They also cared about the credibility of the tools as they showed concerns about how these tools worked behind the scenes.

As for takeaway actions, we intend to offer more detailed help and illustration document to help users understand and engage in this procedure more thoroughly and provide authoritative references and suggestions to boost credibility.

Contextual Inquiry

Because the practical tools seemed too vigorous for college students, we thought games could be a good alternative. Hence, we decided to use contextual inquiry to see how participants do in financial games. We conducted interpretation sessions for each interview and used the notes for affinity diagramming, which led to new insights.

Insights:
1. Individuals can be overwhelmed by the complexity of personal finance
2. Financial games are only useful for people to learn basic knowledge with simple context
3. Individuals favor human guidance when seeking for advice
4. Individuals favor convenience over risk and intuition over calculation
5. Individuals show interest in learning about finance but don’t know how to

Speed Dating

We walked the wall by first gathering and reflecting on our research and insights from our affinity diagram and past deliverables. We then used stickers to consolidate and group our insights to display the design ideas, user needs and the questions we identified during the walk the wall. This ultimately allowed us to better understand our problem space, the needs of our target users, and areas of opportunity.

We each generated 8 possible solution scenarios to different needs, and posted them on our Miro board. We then labeled the needs we addressed and voted on them with stars as a team.

We each selected one user need for which we created a set of storyboards. Then, we conducted speed dating sessions to get feedback from users on how accurately each storyboard represented the user needs as well as the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.

After compiling all the findings, we discovered that the most wanted solution was to get help from a mentor they trust.

Experience Prototyping

In prototype testing, the mentor and mentee each received a different deck of virtual cards with open-ended or fill-in-the-blank questions as conversation starters. They took turns picking a card and reading it aloud to begin discussions on different topics of personal finance.

Findings and Insights:
- Not only did the mentee learn from this experience, the mentor did too
- Participants enjoyed learning how other people manage their finances
- Most participants opened side topics and grew their conversation organically from the prompt
- Some questions were new or unclear to both mentors and mentees and they wished to have some help on those

Hence, we iterated on our question design and added hints to each one.

Final Thoughts:
My team in this project was one of the best teams I have ever worked with. We worked closely together on every part of the project, so we were all on the same page. The work was evenly distributed and everyone was happy to take on any extra work when necessary. We all took full responsibility for our own parts. I knew I got super lucky with this team and this seamless collaboration was one of a kind.