Although I was originally hired as an animation intern at Perch Credit, I was always asked to do some design work for the company. During March of 2021, the tech team and the product designer were on a severe product sprint, and they asked me and Vicky Chang, my coworker, to design the financial literacy section of the app, a place where we would teach our users about finance. I took the lead on the project and worked for a few weeks, consistently presenting them t Iris Lu, the product designer at Perch Credit.
The Fin Lit section is now available on the Perch App in the App Store.
Role: Product Designer
Skills: Wireframing, Interaction, Prototyping
Team: Emma Johnston and Aiden Yoo
Timeline: April 2021 (24 Hour Design Challenge)
Tools: AdobeXD, Procreate
Wireframing
Lead
Wireframing
Asset Design
Interaction
Iris Lu
Vicky Chang
March 2021
(Released on
April 1st, 2021)
Figma
01 / PROBLEM
Financial literacy is the confident understanding of concepts including saving, investing and debt that leads to an overall sense of financial well-being and self-trust. It starts by building basic knowledge of money matters, and while Americans could certainly improve on this score, they've made gains in recent years.
The pandemic has exposed many vulnerabilities and challenges that the United States needs to confront immediately. These vulnerabilities have especially made themselves known through financial literacy, that is, knowledge about earnings, expenditures, savings, investments, and long-term financial planning. According to studies compiled by the U.S. Financial Literacy and Education Commission, only one-third of adults could answer at least four of five financial literacy questions on fundamental concepts such as mortgages, interest rates, inflation and risk. About 40% of Americans turn to family, friends, or coworkers when they have a question about finances; to my knowledge there has not been a study about those individuals’ expertise about financial matters; moreover, over 20% of Americans polled by the National Financial Educators Council did not feel they had anyone they trusted when they had a question about finance.
02 / RESEARCH
Our target audience was young adults, specifically Millenials and Gen Z, who don't know anything about financial literacy and are trying to prepare for the future.
Gabby is a creative writing major at USC. Although she is only a sophomore, she is worried about her financial future while being surrounded by all of the affluent students at her school.
Gabby loves listening to FinLit because it teaches her a lot of aspects of Financial Literacy that she was never able to learn in school. She feels more prepared to tackle her life post-graduation.
Amanda is a recent hire at a marketing agency as a photographer, while at work, she always hears her co-workers talk about their personal finance, and feels very clueless and left out.
Amanda appreciates how the FinLit recordings and short and easy to understand. She can quickly get a grasp of any given subject. It inspired her to get focused on her finances.
Mark has to take a 20 minute commute to his job every day. Mark doesn't love listening to music, and prefers listening to educational podcasts or audiobooks on his way to work.
Mark finds the FinLit recordings very convenient. Since they are short, he is able to learn all about a topic in just one ride. Although he feels financially secure, he thinks he could learn more.
To learn more about the current design systems and user flows of finlit apps, our team researched some of the most popular financial apps on the market.
We also included other apps which features we admired, to create a truly immersive and interesting learning experience for the user.
The NerdWallet learning section has a lot of very important information sectioned into separate sections making it a great place to learn about financial literacy.
Every piece of media is in a long list and all looks the same, a little overwhelming for the user.
Acorns has a very nice learning section with instructional videos as well as blog posts. The video UI is very indormative and introduces a new way to learn about financial literacy.
Not very well organized. Also, the app itself does not include this learning section.
Very clean interface that makes it very easy to listen to music as well as podcasts. Sleek with a nice hierarchy and very intuitive to use. Also recommends media based on previous listens.
Not optimal for learning. Need a way to seamlessly include transcriptions as well as episodes.
03 / IDEATION
How do we help people develop a stronger understanding of basic financial concepts so that, eventually, they can handle their money better.
For our first wireframes, we weren't exactly sure what we wanted the Financial Literacy part of the app to entail. We tried combining audio clips, videos, and blog posts.
After the creation of our first wireframes, we realized the incorperatig all of these different forms of media made the section of the app too complicated. Although it would work if the whole app was about financial lieracy, having so many different things under a singular tab overwhelmed the user, and made the interface confusing.
Here are some of the examples of the iterations the process went through. This project was very unique because even though I was building most of it, I would check back in with Iris Lu, the Perch product designer, and she would give me advice on my design, and teach me about aspects of product design.
04/ BRANDING
05/ SOLUTION
Perch Fin Lit teaches users about the complexities of financial literacy. You can explore topics such as Credit Scores, Emergency Funds, and Crypto Currency. Financial literacy equips you with the financial knowledge and skills that are helpful to make informed decisions, in regards to the use and management of money.
01/ DISCOVER
THE SEARCH BAR
Search specific topics or interests in the search bar. You will be able to find not only overarching topics but also lessons and specific episodes.
02 / SAVE
YOUR SAVED LESSONS
Save lessons and episodes to have them show up at your main screen. If you are in the middle of a saved episode, it will show how how far into the episode you have gone when you enter the home screen. You can also find all your saved episodes in the “Saved” section.
03 / LEARN
THE AUDIO PLAYER
Learn all about financial literacy through short and succinct audio clips. Each topic has a number of lessons, and each lesson is its own playlist of episodes, showing the episodes in order on the player, as well as showing recommended lessons that users can follow up with.
06 / REFLECTION
Since we were only designing part of an already established app, we didn't have to come up with branding and style. The initial wireframes are so detailed was because we already had parts of the app completely designed. I felt it was better to start from there because it would quickly give us a feel of what the app would look like, a strategy that helped us realize how much purple was in the application, and encouraged us to experiment with other colors to grant the product more liveliness.
For this project, I was also assigned, along with my coworker Vicky, to create assets. Instead of creating them in illustrator, the program I am used to, I decided to create all of them through Figma, a program I had previously only used for product design and collaboration. By forcing myself to use Figma, I learned how to create intricate vector icons with the limited tools that the program provides.
This was my first full product design project and due to that, I had a mentor look over my work for me. I learned so much from creating under Iris. I would present her with wireframes, and she would bring up problems that I hadn't realized. For example, I had made a pretty circular audio player that I thought brought a lot of character to the product. She pointed out, however, that scrubbing through the audio would prove to be much more difficult that way, and I was surprised I hadn't thought of it.
Creating under her guidance taught me a lot about how to be an effective product designer.
Originally, the Financial Literacy part of the Perch App was supposed to include videos animated to the audio clips we currently have on the app. Since we were on a time crunch to release the feature, we were unable to fulfill that vision and we instead had to go with the audio clips on their own. I personally find it a lot easier to pay attention to a video instead of an audio clip, so I would love to find a way to incorporate videos to this part of the app.
Originally, we wanted to include videos, audio clips, and blog posts/articles in Fin Lit. However, since it's only part of a larger app, including a vast range of media would have been too confusing. The only way it would work would be through an app fully dedicated to Financial Literacy. If Perch grows to be a larger brand, I would love to work on a full Financial Literacy product that users would download to learn more about their finances.
