Ask Monie App

Allowing early professionals to achieve financial well-being through an A.I. chatbot
Background
Personal Finance. Why does it have to be this hard? Why is it so daunting? When I was deciding the subject of my capstone project in Springboard (a UX Bootcamp), I wanted to choose a topic that I can be passionate about but also can solve a real life problem. A problem like my friend's ruined credit simply because she was not informed properly in early days and assumed credit card is a magic piece of plastic without consequences. As an early professional myself, I understand the difficulty and lack of confidence of making financial decisions. Therefore I decided to design a product that will solve financial difficulties for early professionals.
Duration
  • 4 Months
My Role
  • Research
  • Design / Illustration
  • Information Architecture
  • User Testing
Tools
RESEARCH
Define
Design
Present
The process was not linear but included above steps.
Desk Research
Before starting to interview people or jumping right into coming up with a solution, I had to conduct a thorough research in order to clearly define the problem. From a desk research, I found out an alarming fact that financial literacy rate is declining in America. According to many of the resources, America ranks 14 in global ranking in financial knowledge, and only 57 percent of adults Americans passed a simple test which consists of 5 finance and economy questions. According to S&P Global FinLit Survey reports, “more than half of Americans have less than $1000 in combined checking and savings accounts, with the average household carrying at least $15,000 in credit card debt"
“
More than half of Americans have less than $1000 in combined checking and savings accounts, with the average household carrying at least $15,000 in credit card debt. How can I help early professionals with their personal finance?
”
The biggest problems that will jeopardize finance wellbeing are Student loans, Credit Card debt and little savings for Retirement which could be even more critical during early stages of saving when they don’t have proper education about finance.
Competitive Analysis
NerdWallet
✮ ✮ ✮ ✮ ☆
Oldest and most well known out of the three. Contains large amount of information including educational articles, but the IA is organized well. Automated entry according to linked accounts.
Fortune City
✮ ✮ ☆ ☆ ☆
Gamification of budgeting initially captivates users but needs improvements in IA and UX.
Personal Capital
✮ ✮ ✮ ☆ ☆
Simplified budgeting app to gather your portfolio in one place. However, it's hard to connect certain institutes. Have some learning curve compared the two apps.
Interview
After gathering information about the problem area, I messaged screener survey to individuals in my professional network to conduct primary research.
My Participants
  • Early professionals in age 22 - 35
  • Currently have at least one source of income
  • Manage their own finance 
  • Have smartphone
  • Have some interest in saving / managing personal finance
recruiting method
  • Linkedin Message
  • Interview Screener
Synthesizing the Interview
After the interview, I was quite daunted by the amount of information I gathered from 5 different individuals. Without proper way of sorting the contents, I wouldn't be able to digest the interview, so I synthesized the results by creating an affinity map and persona.
Affinity Map
Here is my affinity map with classic sticky notes. Since the notes are too small to read, I have transferred the notes to a digital affinity map in Figma. By adding the important aspects and quotations of each interview in sticky notes and grouping them by the themes, I was able to find out which idea I need to concentrate on and include in my solution.
Going over existing campaign experience with stakeholders to gather feedbacks
Findings From the Affinity Map
  • Goals are strong motivation for them to save, and talking to their peers help them setting these goals.
  • Whatever the solution will be, it needs to be simple and easy to use,
  • Many of the participants feel budgeting apps are not needed and is uncomfortable to use
  • The participants felt that they are lost and when they try to find an answer there are too much information that they feel overwhelmed.
Affinity Map organized and grouped in Figma
Persona
Persona: Careful Susan
  • Age: 28
  • Occupation: Senior Data Administrator
  • Relationship Status: Have SO
  • Keep track of money flow: Yes
  • Digital security: Yes
  • Saving: ✮ ✮ ✮ ✮ ☆
  • “I hope I can buy a house before mid 30. How much should I save every month from now on?”
Persona: Simple Tom
  • Age: 23
  • Occupation: Part Time English Teacher/ MBA student
  • Relationship Status: Casually Dating
  • Keep track of money flow: No
  • Digital security: No
  • Saving: ✮ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
  • “I need precise budgeting in order to pay off all my debts and start saving for my future business.”

Insights
After the interview, I was quite daunted by the amount of information I gathered from 5 different individuals. Without proper way of sorting the contents, I wouldn't be able to digest the interview, so I synthesized the results by creating an affinity map and persona.
1
Although the participants understand the importance of personal finance, they sometimes have trouble staying interested in it.
2
The participants can't stand complex processes in managing personal finance. (Especially long, boring onboarding process)
3
The participants feel that they have trouble in their research regarding personal finance due to the large amount of resources
4
The participants usually don’t have concrete goals and budget plans for their personal finance
5
The participants are unsure how they are doing with their own personal finance but learns the standard by discussing it with their peers
User MVP
As an early professional who started managing my finance, I want to learn my money flow to follow my budgeting plans in order to achieve my financial goals, build concrete financial goals, and motivate myself so that I can keep up with my budget and savings to achieve the goals.
User Flow for Red Routes
After the interview, I was quite daunted by the amount of information I gathered from 5 different individuals. Without proper way of sorting the contents, I wouldn't be able to digest the interview, so I synthesized the results by creating an affinity map and persona.
1
Learn Your Money Flow
2
Build a Concrete Financial Goal
3
Get credit card recommendation from the Chatbot
Ideation & Iteration
How Might We make managing personal finance fun and easy to motivate struggling early professionals successfully achieve their financial goals?
Potential Solutions
  • Users needed to create a solid goal to stay motivated
  • The app cannot be complicated or boring
  • Users need opportunities to discuss about finance
In order to create a product that can keep the users interested, I decided to use mashup ideation method to come up with a potential solution - Personal Finance + Texting. The result, AI chatbot system will educate, remind, converse with the users.
Moodboard
I may have thought I need to utilize blue for the feel of "trust" like Chase or Visa does with their branding. However, I instantly changed my mind and decided that I need more friendly color than professional blue. That's why I turned to Green, which has meaning like freshness, hope and finance. Well, it turned out that a lot of other companies use green as well, like Robinhood and Nerdwallet being the few examples.
Style Guide
Before beginning the actual design, I needed to set up an overarching style guide. It was longer journey then I thought. Starting with colors, I learned that Accessibility is the key.  I used WebAIM to ensure color variations have enough contrast from each other. (Not with the color next to each other but with every other color in the list with exception of Yellow which has WCAG Pass for AA with Green 1.)
Learning about Accessibility, I finally solved my long question of why the branding colors were changing last couple years for companies like Robinhood and CreditKarma. For Typefaces, I was venturing different set of fonts but arrived to the conclusion that Poppins embodies AskMonie's friendliness and modern aesthetics.
Lo-Fi Sketches & Wireframes
Sketching the ui and building sketches prototype was a quick way to validate and iterate the solution to better suit the user's needs. Marvel Pop was used to weave the sketches into a prototype.
Sketches were evaluated and iterated by gathering feedbacks from guerrilla usability testing. If you are interested, feel free to take a look at sketch prototype in below.
Check out Marvel Pop
After sketches were evaluated by the users, the designs were developed to low fidelity wireframe
Learning about Accessibility, I finally solved my long question of why the branding colors were changing last couple years for companies like Robinhood and CreditKarma. For Typefaces, I was venturing different set of fonts but arrived to the conclusion that Poppins embodies AskMonie's friendliness and modern aesthetics.
Final Design
In order to ensure consistent visual tone, I used 8px grid for the final ui designs.
Check out Hi-Fi Prototype
Other Projects
RangeMe Campaign
Nielsen IQ
Ask Monie
Usability
Interview
2 weeks
recruiting method
  • Users needed to create a solid goal to stay motivated
  • The app cannot be complicated or boring
  • Users need opportunities to discuss about finance

In order to create a product that can keep the users interested, I decided to use mashup ideation method to come up with a potential solution - Personal Finance + Texting. The result, AI chatbot system will educate, remind, converse with the users.
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