BRAND
Teno
PROJECT
HOME ACCOUNTING
AIM
To design a product where families can manage and track financial expenses and their savings
LEARNING
Contextual Inquiry
Interpretation
Work Models
Affinity Mapping
​
THE LEARNING MUST GO ON.
After working as a UX designer past 3 years, I felt that I was not exploring new methods/processes to understand the user better. I felt that I was stuck in the ocean and now it was time to learn new things to explore new methods.
I started searching for online and offline user experience courses where I will learn new things and improve my knowledge.
Through the internet, I got to know IIT Bombay provides 15 days of HIC courses by Dr Anirudha Joshi, read multiple reviews, and had words with ex-participants regarding these courses.
This course was conducted from 1st June to 15th June, where we learned about Contextual interviews, Work models, Interpreting interviews, Affinity Mapping, Conceptual Models, User Experience Metrics, and the importance of micro-interactions.
“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.”
― Henry Ford
Home accounting team members and Prof. Anirudha Joshi
DESIGN BRIEF
People in their families are facing challenges in managing & tracking financial expenses & savings. With the increase in online payment, more money becomes virtual, intangible, and difficult to visualize and track.
CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY
To understand “what matters”, we started with conducting contextual inquiries to collect a large number of data sets. To get a wide range of data, we conducted user interviews with different categories of people.
We conducted 19 interviews. Following is the spectrum of the variability of the people we interviewed:
-
Income: Lower-income, Mid-income, Upper Middle Class, High income
-
Size of the family: Nuclear Family, Joint Family, bachelor
-
Stages of Life: Just starting out, Newly married, Well Settled, Retired
-
Profession: Salaried folks - Govt jobs, Corporate Jobs; Homemakers, Daily wage workers, Business class
-
No. of earning members in a household: Single breadwinner, Multiple contributors
-
Region/Culture: South India, North India, West coast, Old-fashioned, New-age couples
INTERPRETATION
After conducting interviews, we interpreted all the interviews and proceeded to classify them as User Statements, Observations, and Breakdowns to derive Insights and Design Ideas.
WORK MODELS
To understand the system better from the eye of our users, we drew up a working model of our target audience. We were able to identify a few key major breakdowns from the same.
AFFINITY MAPPING
After doing the interpretation exercise, we gathered qualitative information and organized that information into a similar group in the affinity mapping.
For this, we used the bottom-up approach
FINDINGS
After finishing the affinity mapping, we collated all our key insights and design ideas which we could then refer to as the design actionable opportunity.
INSIGHTS
-
Unsystematic approach to tracking and accounting.
-
Tracking at a superficial level, not granular.
-
High incomes folks don’t feel the need to track.
-
Tell me how to start - need for awareness.
-
Cash tracking problems.
-
Privacy concerns between family members.
-
Why should I care if my family member knows to account?
-
Fear of leak of account details; Credibility and trust.
-
Manual entries suck.
-
Convenience comes at a cost - uncontrolled spending.
-
Redistribution of finances between accounts and family members.
-
Decision-making in households.
CULTURE INSIGHTS
-
People value relationships.
-
People relate to/prefer tangible experiences & outcomes.
-
Emotions like peer pressure & guilt impact decision-making.
-
People become more mindful as their responsibility increases.
TARGET AUDIENCE
Based on our research, the need for financial planning and tracking expenses is felt in the Middle class
-
Low-income folks live day to day - Money in, money out
-
High-income folks don't feel the need to track home expenses closely for various reasons
With all these things in mind, we proceeded to come up with design ideas that will be relevant.
DESIGN IDEA
-
Make tracking seamless.
-
Centralized billing system.
-
Visualization and data presentation (dashboards).
-
Transaction categorisation.
-
Reports
-
Trends/insights.
-
Gamification and use of Emotional triggers to promote good behaviour.
-
Goal Tracking/ Planning.
-
Data security; building trust and credibility.
-
Knowledge base to raise awareness.
-
Option to compare prices- offline vs online.
-
Roles and permissions.
-
Managing multiple credentials.
-
Tracking shared expenses.
-
Checklist to track the fixed expenses.
-
Reminders.
-
Varying levels of access and visibility.
GOALS
USABILITY GOALS
Usability goals setting tool by Prof. Anirudha Joshi, IIT Bombay
-
To face minimal friction while keeping track of all expenses.
-
To derive meaningful data from financials to make prudent decisions.
-
To develop a feeling of trust and security while sharing their personal details.
-
The user must not feel held back because of education or regional/language restrictions.
PRIMARY GOALS
-
To seamlessly automate (or add) to track and manage all expenses systematically.
-
To minimize the cognitive load to save and manage money to achieve future goals.
-
To help families kick-start their journey towards personal financing.
PERSONA
We defined persona from our contextual inquiry and affinity map, keeping major breakdown, insights and demographics in our mind.
Personal persona
USE CASE SCENARIO
​In order to convey and visualise our design ideas, we created a short film. This short film depicts our use case scenarios for our primary user group. These scenarios include major breakdowns user faces and how our design fits into their life.
Scenario 1
Maintain daily fixed expenses and schedule payments:
Milkman - Unsystematic maintenance of records.
Set scheduler for recording fixed expenses
Scenario 2
Set a long-term goal.
Family trip
Set a long-term goal family trip
Scenario 3
Every member can add their daily expenses manually.
Vegetable vendor - Cash tracking
Record your daily expenses
Scenario 4
View all your goals, all expenses and the savings.
Ruffling through different accounts; No consolidated picture of finances; Can’t remember passwords—demo of onboarding, adding a family and accounts, dashboards and visualisation.
VISUAL DESIGN
DESIGN EVALUATION
(User Testing)
After creating a visual designs for all the scenarios, we went to the user testing to understand and collect information about the usability and overall user experience of our product.
FEEDBACK
-
Some navigation elements were not functioning as expected - bottom nav, back button.
-
Confusion between Goals and Schedules features.
-
Inconsistency in a few terms across pages - Cadence, frequency, recurrence. Other verbiage-related pointers.
-
Data/Choices weren’t completely visible to the user in a few places.
-
Some trouble grasping the conceptual model given the grand scheme of the ‘’All-in-one’’ approach.
-
Too much data in places which were overwhelming. Visualization aspects could be better.
-
The language barrier was pointed out.
PLAN TO ADDRESS
-
Some of the easier-to-implement feedback has already been dealt with - Language inconsistencies, Prominence of important functionalities, and Data presentation.
-
Plan to prioritize the rest after running a few more extensive tests to get a richer source of feedback data.
