Discovering The Problem

This project was a result of a 5 day design sprint.
‍Sprint team: Hadi, Andrew, Matt, Huma
‍

‍Role: during the design sprint, the roles were equally divided. The outcome was achieved through a collaborative approach. My contributions included: user research, user interviews, storyboarding, ideation, rapid prototyping and user testing. I focused on the user interface design alongside Andrew.

View Invision Prototype Here

GET IN TOUCH

416.877.5782 hadi.mousattat@gmail.com

Project Constraints

This project was a result of a 5 day design sprint.
‍Sprint team: Hadi, Andrew, Matt, Huma
‍

The Client

Station Bank (a fictional financial institution) aims to demystify the complexity of saving, spending and investing money. They currently operate with an existing responsive website and are looking to expand their services.

Request: To create a native mobile app that offers something different for existing customers.

Target Demographic: Young professionals (22-27) who have graduated 2-3 years ago and don’t have enough savings.

Insights Summary:

Insight #1

Drivers find city parking street signage confusing and misleading. It is puzzling when drivers have to process so many mixed messages at once. Lack of standardized zones makes every block a special and unpredictable case.

GET IN TOUCH

416.877.5782 hadi.mousattat@gmail.com

Insight #2

Drivers are in a constant search for free or inexpensive parking options. Like Thomas and Ian, they use tools like Google Maps to search the area for residential and city parking in the area.

Insight #3

Not knowing where to park adds anxiety to drivers trips. Especially when planning to visit unfamiliar destinations.

Insight #4

Drivers lack the tools to plan their parking ahead of time. Conventional tools like Google Maps only offer the tip of the iceberg and parking apps aren’t yet to be popular among drivers in the city.

The Process

To help achieve the objective efficiently, our team followed the design sprint method, a 5-day design sprint created by Google Ventures. It is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with final users and customers; basically, a way to solve design problems quickly.

Day 1: Map

To set a long-term goal, we needed to further define the problem and to start goal setting by asking a wide range of questions. Why are we doing it? Who are we doing it for? To meet our goals, what needs to be true? These sorts of questions helped set a good direction and foundation early on in the process.

Secondary Research:

To further understand the financial environment and challenges facing young graduates, our team conducted secondary research from various sources like journal articles, reports, news reports and so on.

Our team needed to conduct research to understand the primary issues faced by recent graduates in order to help us design a useful tool for them.

Nearly half of Canadians are $200 away from being broke

A growing percentage of millennials have absolutely nothing saved

Canadian’s saving habits don’t align with their spending goals

Primary Research: (Interviews insights)

Initially, it was assumed that our target audience wanted to save money or invest but through the interviews, it was evident that our target audience preferred to put away money to achieve a spending goal. (purchasing electronics, going on big trips, clothing etc ...)

The majority of the users are currently using basic tools, 3rd party apps or excel sheets to keep track of their budgets (a key insight assisting our design direction)

The users did not understand the difference between disposable and discretionary income

Primary User: (Person)

To represent our user group, we created a primary persona. Steve is a reflection of the provided target demographic and a consolidation of all of the interviewees we met during our primary research. As we move forward, we need to approach our design decisions with empathy and consideration to what Steve’s struggles and pain points are.

Day 2: Inspiration finding & Sketching

Inspiration

Converging and inspiration finding was valuable in setting the tone and finding consensus among the design team on how to best design our solution. We reviewed several key products searching for ideas and patterns that existed in budgeting, banking, and productivity apps. Track my spend, Wealth Simple, TD Savings, etc …

Idea Sketching

Now that we shared and discussed a lot of great ideas, it was time to begin idea sketching. We implemented crazy 8’s exercise sketching eight distinct ideas in eight minutes.

The goal was to push ourselves beyond the initial idea and to generate a wide variety of solutions to our challenge. The outcome was productive where most of us generated unpredictable yet useful ideas.

Day3: Decide

Art Museum

On day 3, each member of the team posted their crazy 8’s and any other sketches they came up with from day 2. All sketches were anonymously posted in a long row on a big board. The Art Museum is essential to any design sprint where members (often not exclusive to design team) get to vote on the best sketches anonymously with dot stickers.

Using the art museum helped us generate a heat map with dot stickers to see what the most popular app function is. It was an opportunity to let the work speak for itself without its owners promoting it leading to social biases. However, the work does need to be explained afterwards through a speed critique exercise. The owners then have a chance to explain their ideas under a limited time managed by a facilitator.

The Verdict

After reviewing and discussing many ideas and designs, the team voted in favour of the idea of “Save To Spend”. In which our solution will become a multifaceted integrated tool for young professionals to not only manage their spending but to also help them save towards their spending goals.

Day5: Test

After finalizing our first greyscale wireframes, it was time to test our solution. Day 5 was entirly dedicated to testing the product. We tested the product with 5 users that fit our target demographic.

Test Insights

Add in check box for reminders and, and income with expenses

expenses item didn’t show dollar value

the comparison between disposable and discretionary income is really helpful

Station Bank: Design Sprint