Chime Financial Literacy

A partnership with Chime to improve financial literacy among young adults

Capstone Spring 2022

Project Team

  • Brisa Jimenez

  • Katia Meuleman

  • Valerie Remaker

  • Aiza Ali

Chime Financial Literacy Offerings

Audit of Chime’s current financial literacy education. This audit helped us determine what kinds of financial knowledge are beneficial to the average Chime user.


 

Chime Current Financial Literacy Supplementation

Competitive Analysis

We chose to conduct an analysis of the competitors in FinTech as well as current educational platforms to understand the current financial literacy environment.

 

Chime Current Financial Literacy Supplementation

Early Design and Research Questions

Our design process was not linear . As we continued to understand our users needs we perfected our design and research questions.


 

Design Questions

  • How can we make financial literacy education more quick, fun, and accessible and help build individuals’ wealth?

  • Do we design financial literacy education within users’ finance tools or outside of it?

Research Questions

What categories of financial literacy are most useful to users?

  • What does financial literacy mean to users?

  • What is the easiest way for someone to build wealth?

  • How do you move from paycheck to paycheck to accumulate wealth?

  • What are the differences in the knowledge base between those who have financial literacy and those who do not?

  • Why are users feel motivated to learn about finances?

  • What are the most effective ways to engage users on financial literacy?

  • How do people avoid and escape debt?

Survey

Goals:

  • Understand current financial products used by people from any income bracket

  • Discover more about people's relationship with their finances

Findings:

We received 82 Responses from our Typeform Survey. Findings were analyzed using a codebook and affinity diagramming.

  • People not living paycheck to paycheck utilized more financial services than those who were living paycheck to paycheck.

  • Those who were not living paycheck to paycheck knew more financial topics and specifics than those who were living paycheck to paycheck.

  • Those who were not living paycheck to paycheck had more familial support and generational financial knowledge than those who were living paycheck to paycheck.

  • Those who were not living paycheck to paycheck have more passive income streams, such as 401ks, Roth IRAs than those who were living paycheck to paycheck.

Scoping our User group: Those who make less than $75K identify as having little financial literacy and feel they live paycheck to paycheck.

 

Affinity Diagram example

Key Insights: Financial literacy features preferred by those with high incomes are different from those with low incomes.

Expert Interview

We conducted an interview with Thomas Gilbert Associate Professor of Finance and Business Economics at The University of Washington

 

Why?

Financial Literacy is a complex topic which we as a team was not prepared to have proper content for our users.

What did we learn?

People learn from doing. Impactful education is directly related to users’ finances.

  • Give personalized examples of a person's financial situation

  • Teach in different ways from quizzes, video, to case studies

  • People must know employer benefits and retirement matching

  • Drill the importance of compound interest: the good and the bad

  • Exploring what resources exist for free

  • Do not go into stocks & bonds

Interviews

We conducted 12 interview participants who identify as living paycheck to paycheck < $75k a year

Why?

Financial Literacy is very personal we conducted 12 interviews with users who identified with making less than $75K

  • Decide on the creation of an app within people's finances or outside of them.

  • Understanding people's definitions of financial literacy.

  • Understand users method for gaining financial literacy.

  • Garner user perspectives on getting advice from social media such as YouTube.

  • Understand what kind of solutions users will engage with.

  • Understanding the kind of information people want to build wealth.

  • Understand the relationship between monetary life and financial literacy.

  • Understand the content needs that people are looking to engage with.

What did we learn?

Personalization

  • Interviewees expressed the desire for their financial services to be more tailored to their needs

  • Some wished for budgeting tools to be more representative ( their specific life situations

  • Others wished that processes were more tailored to their goals, such as "If I am XYZ age, what steps do I have to take to retire in 20 years?"

  • Simplicity

    • Participants expressed that they learned best when complex topics are explained in a simple way

    • Participants learned best when someone else could explain to them subjects step-by-step in a simple manner

  • Trust

    • Credibility is determined by qualifications and evidence-based sources

    • Misinformation on social media is a big concern, prompting interviewers to distrust finance advice on social media platforms

    • Interviewees were more likely to trust people they personally knew over strangers online

  • Obstacles

    • Participants struggled with numerous issues, immigration, inconsistent income, precarious living situations, age barriers, and external stressors

“I'm totally ignorant when it comes to real basics like 401k. I couldn't even tell you anything about that. ”

—Participant 2

“It's kind of a catch 22 because if I work more there is less time for school and if I have less time for school then I probably fail classes..”

— Participant 4

Design Principles.

Keywords

Keywords from the user research and codebook.

Balance give the user what they need vs. what they want.

Trust in the learning process and information.

Personalization provide the user with what will help them now and motivate them to continue.

Clarity define the path to gain financial knowledge.

Empower the user to feel confident in themselves and their finances.

Problem Statements

  • Users often feel overwhelmed, lost, or intimidated knowing how to start learning about finances

  • Users lack the motivation to practice financial literacy

  • Financial practices like 401k or savings are abstract and can be difficult for users to visualize the benefits

  • Users are given advice that is not impactful to their current experience and suffers from "shouldism" for example "I should be investing" or "I should be in crypto"

How Might We

  • HMW give the user impactful knowledge but also allowing them to explore various financial interests.

  • HMW leave users feeling confident in their financial knowledge and the progress they are making in their learning

  • HWM provide valuable information to help them here and now

  • HMW clearly present information that is valuable to them using visual representations

  • HMW create a trusting and non-judgemental learning environment

Personas to guide our design

  • Laura

    Laura represented our older adult generation that identified as living paycheck to paycheck. She has a wealth of knowledge but experiences real life barriers to building wealth like health and family.

  • Mark

    Mark represents our users who are just starting their financial literacy journey. Mark feels pressure to improve his financial literacy but planning for the future seems too abstract.

Journey Maps

  • Laura

  • Mark

 

Crazy 8’s

Brainstom with a crazy 8’s session

I explored a slider that helps you determine how to accomplish financial goals. The slider gives you actionable steps to help you reach your goals.

 

Storyboard

Brainstorm with storyboarding.

In the example, Mark had an accident and needed help determining if he can afford to buy a new skateboard. The feature helped him determine if it fit within his budget. This feature gave Mark the clarity to determine how to make a responsible purchase.

 

Coding with Keywords

I applied our design principles and keywords to our storyboard sketches to determine which designs best align with our research.

IA Figjam

Information Architecture

As a precursor to wireframing we created an IA.

Key decisions: Lessons would be presented to the user in order of necessity. For example, if a user has student debt a debt lesson would first be recommended before something like investing or stock educational lesson.

Wireframes

  • Learning Path

    From our UXR we found people often feel overwhelmed and unsure where to start when it comes to improving financial literacy. Using a road map gives people guidance, increases motivation, and gives people clarity.

  • Visual Learning

    We adopted educational design tactics from our competitive analysis. With UXR showing most people identify as visual and kinesthetic learners we applied active learning concepts to the financial literacy lessons

  • Support

    We explored various forms of learning and relatability. UXR found people feel shame and loneliness, people used Youtube and social media for advice.

  • Lessons

    The motivation was a common hurdle people struggle with when it came to learning finances. We explored how to show progression through the educational lesson with progress circles for motivation.

  • Impactful learning

    We offer the user to connect to their bank, this allows us to offer the user a more personal experience.

  • Confidence building

    We included short quizzes to increase users’ confidence this was inspired by our expert interview. We use visuals to celebrate success!

  • Give them control

    Our user’s time is valuable so we gather user goal’s to help us develop the most impactful experience. This allows us to recommend topics they are interested in.

Co-design 1

We shared our low-fidelity wireframes with users within our group of people who make less than 75K and live paycheck to paycheck.

Why?

Financial literacy is very personal. We wanted to see what our user group thought about the solutions before moving forward with the designs.

What did we learn?

  • Users did not see value in an app that is primarily focused on quizzes and learning activities.

  • Users preferred to link banking vs. answering personal finance questions.

  • Users wanted simplicity and clear guidance on how to make financial decisions first then the ability to learn about the why of the decision more if they so choose

  • Users want clear visuals of progress and current states

Following the co-design session we decided to re-visit our user research and quickly brainstorm how we can include the feedback from the co-design session.

Lo-fidelity prototype

  • Guidance

    A slider helps people visualize how to set healthy spending goals

  • Visual goals

    An overview page quickly allows people to set and check various goals

  • Personalized learning

    Users want to choose what they search for but enjoy knowing what they find is related to their finances

  • Visual progress

    Users are motivated by seeing their current financial environment and how they can improve it

Final Prototype

Key Features:

Learn with your finances: be motivated by lessons that will directly improve your financial health

Active learning: personalized lessons when you want them

Progress: always know where you are at in your finances and goals

Auto pay helps users stick to goals
Quickly view your financial health and never feel alone with unique content
Active Learning within your finances

User Test

Though we could not do another iteration of prototyping we would like to continue to learn how we could improve our designs.

What did we learn?

Users enjoyed the active learning and would enjoy more throughout the application. Further exploration of how to include lessons in personal finances needs to be explored, some users were confused by the mixing of the two.

Final Reflection

Financial literacy is something many people struggle with as well as myself. I believe knowledge can help others feel empowered which can lead to increased financial health. I found it very difficult to learn how users’ confidence is so low when it came to financial literacy. There are alot of shame surrounding one’s finances and this can often lead people to suffer alone and be too ashamed to seek help.

My team completed many iterations of design, though this was challenging I think this gave us a very unique experience and research-based solutions. If I could change anything it would have been to continue with high-fidelity prototyping but spend more time on the content. Our lack of financial knowledge made it difficult for our team to develop accurate prototypes for testing. I would have liked to do user testing with our expert interview to get his feedback as a content expert. 

Our final designs were developed with a younger audience in mind. I would have liked to continue to explore how to help older generations with financial literacy. It would be interesting and challenging to design solutions that work for both generations. I imagine it would look visually very different. Overall I am very grateful to have had this experience with my team, my educators, our TA, our project participants, and my sponsors at Chime. Thank you and please reach out for questions or feedback.

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