‍Poor financial health in American citizens is not just an income problem, hovever regaining control could entail the use of technology with a human touch.

‍According to earlier research presented by Dr. Phoel, nearly 70% of American households struggle with some form of financial strain, with nearly 50% spending as much as they earn or more. However, since financial management through the means of an app can be a deeply personal and complicated topic given the security issues associated, Dr. Phoel proposes that a combination of technology and a human touch could prove effective.

The existing research gaps which influenced our team’s research goals and study design when it came to graduate students were:

Our goals for the study included developing a deeper understanding of the emotions, experiences, and technology usage of international students as they transition to and learnmore about finances in the US. Specifically, we aimed to identify what information gaps exist for international students, what information they wished was more accessible, and what sources offinancial information they found most trustworthy.

Based on findings from our interviews, we aimed to develop design concepts for a financial literacy toolkit, as guided by Dr. Phoel.

The target users for our study are graduating international students, who wish to manage their finances well in the US.

We had participants with various experience levels of experience and financial literacy. The research team interviewed four participants in total, varying in the programs they attend, age, and experience with managing finance back in their home countries and in the US.

In-Depth Interviews

Our team conducted semi-structured interviews in pairs, including an interviewer, who conducted the interview, and a recorder, who took notes within the interviewee’s own words. The semi-structured format provided flexibility to ask follow-up questions as needed, but also enough guidance to ensure comparisons between interviews.

We elected not to use observation or ethnographic methods as we did not feel comfortable observing how people use their bank/budgeting applications.

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Interpretation Session

After this, our team held interpretation sessions wherein the interviewer and recorder pairs walked through a given interview with the broader team.

This worked as an immersion experience for the entire team and helped us create our affinity notes.

Within our final diagram, we identified seven key insights.

These are denoted by the green sticky notes which are the highest level of the affinity diagram and represent the mostcondensed as well as intriguing findings.

From there, we synthesized these insights further using experience models to generate our overarching conclusions and understand common concerns.

The Affinity Diagram confirmed strong emotional influences behind our participants' financial decision making.

‍Sensation boards serve as a great tool when developing a product with a primary focus of realizing an emotional experience. This choice was further supported by the unique emotional responses of our interviewees as our questions and their respective answers provided us with experiential insights on their financial knowledge as well as learning experiences.

We also identified three distinct knowledge levels of financial literacy in our participants.

‍Therefore, we chose Personas as our second model for representation. Personas help us understand our users’ needs, experiences, and behaviors more deeply. The insights gained from our affinity diagram allowed us to identify and directly respond to three knowledge levels as well as stages of financial literacy: novice (Timid Ting), intermediate (Eager Edger), and advanced (Specific Sabrina).

We used the Wall Walk to socialize our findings and models with our client, Dr. Phoel, as well as the rest of the class. The spectators were encouraged to leave notes for any issues or interesting ideas that they discovered while studying our findings.

The feedback received from the client as well as the notes gathered during the wall walks rounded out our list of issues observed as well as provided us with some design recommendations.

Our Models and Wall Walk helped us capture a total of 13 unique issues faced by international student.

While addressing each issue individually would be challenging, we attempted to distill them to 4 major themes, which were:

Once all the main issues were identified, we decided to ideate using a Visioning Session. Here, all team members came together to create an ideal narrative of the user's life while using a product that would help them increase their financial literacy. This freeform setup is extremely useful in generating a high volume of potential design solutions which are then converted into a product concept.

We drew inspiration from current engaging platforms that people use and pondered ways to make studying finances exciting while also keeping the topic's sensitivity and importance in mind.

Our models, in particular the sensation board, were critical in guiding our design solutions.

We were able to generate a medium-fidelity product concept, named Findamentals.

Based on our insights, we included ways to personalize content, video courses, resources, and a community board in our final concept.