Cognitive-based design to influence structured financial planning and money management for young people
Stakeholders
Head of UX and Design
Head of Engineer
UX/UI Designer
Product team
My Contribution
UX research
Design strategy
Interaction design
User interface design
UX evaluation
Duration
5 months
The project won the Bronze Award from World Usability Initiative in 2022
About
Blackbullion is an education-focused fintech company that supports financial wellness for all students and is trusted by 40+ institutions in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.
Challenge
How might we help young people manage their money regularly and motivate them to put their financial knowledge to practise?
Research approach
Adopting the notion of cognitive theories in metal budgeting to design
Cognitive theories
Design process
User-centered design
Understanding problems
User Behaviors Analytics
Literature review
Competitor research
Stakeholders interview
Ideating, prototype & design
Wire-framing
Paper prototype
Hi-fi prototype
UI Design
Evaluating
User Experience
Guerilla testing
In-lab Usability testing
Eye-gaze tracking analytics
System Usability Scale
Who are the users?
More than 60% of users are between the ages of 18 and 34. They live in the big city and use the site mostly via mobile and desktop devices*
*Data collected from Blackbullion (Google Analytics) during January to April 2022
What are they doing?
I synthesized data from students’ interviews, stakeholder interviews, and ~10.000 user data records of Blackbullion about the budget calculator tools.
How we manage budget mentally?
I created a model based on Mental Budgeting theory and Budget Intention theory
1/
Budget setting
We label money as relevant to a certain class of products
Design Strategy
When someone begins managing their money, they must first evaluate their financial situation and income-to-expense ratio.
Design Strategy
Understanding the situation helps them formulate a strategy and take right actions to reach their goals
Design Improvement
From onboarding to engaging with users once they make plans, the user experience was enhanced
Before
After
Design Improvement
Goal-oriented approach
Before
Lack of engagement
Hard to find and create a plan
After
Positive effect
Good attitude
Design Improvement
Make the design more human
Before
Process seems difficult
Cognitive overload
After
1-1 discussion
Cognitive ease
Design Improvement
New interactive patterns
Comparing two versions using gaze plot analysis. The bubbles show where people look and how long they stay there.
Before
High number of fixations
Long fixation duration
After
Reduce time and cognitive load
Simple and easy
Emotional Design
UX Evaluation
Adapting eye-gaze tracking metrics to usability testing
Areas of interest to analyze the users' attention to various visual components.
Gaze plots to understand the visual hierarchy of interfaces to optimize the placement of screen elements
Heat-map to understand user's visual search experience
Linh gave us valuable insight into the cognitive theory around how people budget, and it was very clear how that, along with the qual & quant data we provided, informed the rationale for his prototype.
He presented his research and ideas to the wider team at Blackbullion and sought feedback which we can see he considered in his final designs. Many team members (including our CEO) feed back to me afterward that they were very impressed by his work and the rationale behind the designs.
Linh has been a pleasure to collaborate with, very responsive and always enthusiastic and positive in our interactions. He kept us up to date during the process and presented us research and testing results quickly after they were conducted. I wouldn’t hesitate to work with him in the future!
