Journey
actionable and friendly financial roadmap
Summer 2017
Tools used: Sketch, Principle, framer.js, Adobe Creative Suite
Finances are typically viewed as a source of stress, worry, and anxiety. People want to worry less about their finances, but do not know how to approach them.
Moving forward, we considered the BJ Fogg Behavior Model in order to encourage the formation of healthy financial habits. We started with a large variety of levels in motivation, circumstances, and actions to create ideas regarding our financial anxiety problem statement.
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During the affinity process, we created ideas that followed a formula of:
Subject (WHO) + does (ACTION) + (HOW OFTEN).
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With these rough ideas, we arranged them in an order of how easy it would be for people to take this idea and pulled out 7 potential features.
Process
From our cultural probe, we identified our most popular features (rewards, financial advising, and a financial planning tool) and most common attitudes/behaviors ("Enjoy Today," "Entitlement Mentality," and "Avoidance").
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Alongside this, some other additional key insights included:
At this point, we began creating concepts with our findings from our contextual inquiry in mind. These are a few of the ideas we came up in our early stages.
CHOSEN
Customized Financial Roadmap
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Many common financial goals are broad and ambiguous. For example, “I want to pay off my student loans.” How will you pay off these loans? What are the exact steps you would take? What is your plan in the event of emergency?
These are all uncertainties that we wanted to hit in our design concept solution, along with the aid of human support and guidance.
NOT CHOSEN
AR Financial Progress Bars
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This idea was a more speculative design concept implementing Augmented Reality that would provide one with a visual representation of different parts of their finances. Having a visual breakdown of one's actions has been proven to impact behaviors by providing a sense of accountability, but this concept wasn't rich enough to have much basis to work off of.
DISCLAIMER
This project was created entirely as a concept and does not actually exist within USAA or USAA’s future plans.
Onboarding
Along with our affinitzation, we conducted some secondary research and looked into some of the seven more common detrimental attitudes or behaviors regarding financial spending.
At this point, we created an interactive cultural probe based on the 7 possible features and the 7 attitudes/behaviors we outlined in our initial discovery phase. With both USAA and non-USAA participants, we asked people to sort the features in order of desirability and the attitudes in order of likeliness to act.
During this process, we encouraged people to freely talk through their thoughts while performing the activity and pulled out a few interesting quotes.
"It would be interesting to have an actual smart financial planning tool based on goals, rather than amounts. It’s important to understand the big picture of your finances, not just the numbers.”
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Josh | 31 years old
“A financial planning tool that is friendly and emotionally-based, rather than an overly serious tone would encourage me."
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Mason | 19 years old
People generally do not like sharing their financial records with their friends and family, regardless of how vague the records.
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Financial readiness is crucial, especially at a younger age (college years).
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Instant gratification releases dopamine and positive notifications can tie into the frequent build of helpful habits.
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Avoidance tends to be the most common reaction towards stress; this ties into other familiar human habits like procrastination.
NOT CHOSEN
Reward/Auto-save Function
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Inspired by services like Digit, we also considered a service that would take the difficulty out of saving and budgeting by automatically doing it for the user. This idea also would provide people with small third-party rewards based on the automatic savings. Upon doing some more audit, we realized that this idea had already been done by a few financial companies.
NOT CHOSEN
Streaks with Gamification
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This idea primarily went off of the small dopamine response released in the brain from receiving positive notifications. Every time a user would complete a successful financial goal, that success would be added to a streak counter in order to encourage them to stick to their goal. This concept alone was, again, not strong enough to work off of.
The current millennial's idea of financial security may be completely different from the ideal financial roadmap of an older person. It is important to consider the fact that everyone has different goals and lifestyles, so individualized customizability is important to keep in mind.
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Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed working with the idea of balancing friendly gamification with an actual helpful service while creating this concept. Thank you for taking the time to read through our process!
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Journey is a financial planning tool created as a concept to implement into one of USAA's services, breaking down large and ambiguous goals into actionable, bite-sized steps with the help of friendly, personal guidance from financial consultants.
When setting up Journey, the user will take an onboarding quiz in order for USAA to get to know their specific needs and goals. The quiz is sectioned into three main parts: Financial goals and timeframe, spending habits/current financial background, and lifestyle design.
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The quiz helps the Financial Consultant to understand the user's hopes, dreams and personality. This allows them to tell us, what sort of game they want to play in pursuit of their version of financial health.
Choose your Path
Journey presents three different customizable paces. The routes are all embodied by gamified traveler archetypes and can be customized further to meet one's exact financial needs.
Match with Consultant
At this point, the user is introduced to their individual financial consultant. The consultant acts as a personal guide to help the user reach their financial goals, and will try their best to foster a warm, close relationship with them.
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The role of the Financial Consultant match is to provide the human connection needed to color the more complex or emotional interactions. The consultant can help to break down their consultee's long-term financial goals into small and actionable steps, provide advice, and act as a support system.
The Journey Map is a gamified world mapped out by the financial consultant. The user travels through their map, with each checkpoint representing a small goal or step.
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They gain levels as they completes more checkpoints, with rewards and bonuses integrated into each level as extra incentive to stick to their plan.
My Journey
Progress
The home screen of Journey contains a general overview of the user's goals and steps. In the Progress screen, they can view their progress over a weekly, monthly, yearly, and all-time context. They can also view and edit other information such as their Target Monthly Income, Projected savings, etc.
Consult
Users are encouraged to communicate closely and frequently with their personal consultant through call or chat.
By disrupting the current typical emotionless tone regarding money with a friendlier approach, people might feel more comfort about their financial anxiety.
Foster a friendlier and more holistic approach to financial guidance without coming across as un-serious, annoying, or aggressive?
Hypothesis
How might we
At my internship at USAA, three other interns at the Chief Design Office (CDO) and I created a service concept that could be potentially implemented as one of USAA’s numerous financial services.
Team
Primary Research
Jenn Lee
Project Manager
UX Design
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Delivered:
Research, Project direction, Hi-fi screens, Prototype, Personas, Video
Nolan Canady
UX Design
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Delivered:
Research, Cultural Probe, Content Strategy
Michelle Tamir
Graphic Design​
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Delivered:
Research, Personas, Cultural Probe, Content Strategy
Brandon Anderson
Service Design​
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Delivered:
Research, Cultural Probe, Content Strategy
Contextual Inquiry + Affinitization
Cultural Probe
Key Insights
Concept Direction
Personas
Takeaways