Money&Me financial wellbeing platform
July 2024
Company
Outcome
Unfortunately, the project is still new, so I cannot share any details about the tangible benefits that employers and employees have began seeing yet.
Contribution
User research and testing
User experience
Design system
Context
Companies are becoming increasingly aware of how wellbeing can affect an employees productivity at work. To help engage employees in their financial wellbeing, we created Money&Me, a gamified approach to gaining knowledge with their finances.
Users are able to complete topics to win medals and competitions whilst also increasing their financial wellbeing.
Highlights
A white-label platform to help employers get their employees engaged in their financial wellbeing
Challenge
Fundamentally, it's a known difficulty to get employees engaged with their financial wellbeing, even though so many recognise that it is an issue for them. PWC ran a study to find out the affects of poor financial wellbeing on the workplace.
The report read, "A clear correlation has been identified between financial health and overall wellbeing. There is evidence that poor financial health affects employees’ physical, mental and social wellbeing, which can cause reduced effectiveness, productivity and absence from the workplace".
The findings from this report show that with a better approach to employees benefits and focusing on their wellbeing in new ways, can not only help benefit the users, but also benefit the business goals of increasing productivity. The challenge is therefore, how can we create a compelling platform that employees would enjoy using, that can benefit themselves, as well as their employers?
A 12 week deadline
Platform needed to be delivered to client in time for new school year
Minimising jargon
Helping users understand key terms was a key targets
Outcome
Unfortunately, the project is still new, so I cannot share any details about the tangible benefits that employers and employees have began seeing yet.
Watch this space though as I will update when the details come through.
Leading design principles
Clear orientation
Keeping users informed about their progress through journeys
Digital first
Encouraging users to remain on the digital journey but offering an alternative
Test and learn
Asking questions to understand user motivations and act on the findings
The process
To begin, we wanted to focus on how we could develop a platform that employees would continually want to return to keep their financial knowledge in check.
We considered how such apps that have risen to fame using gamification, apps such as Duolingo and KhanAcademy.
With gamification as a core function of the product, we had to figure out who likes learning by gamification, and what are the best ways to gather information.
The following are small parts of the journey we went on to create the app
Personas
We researched the different player types so that we could cater to as many people as possible. It was important after considering the player types to make sure the experience was non-linear we also wanted the product to be a place to come to research topics and answer users questions as much as coming to learn for fun.
The five player types were:
Ideal player
• Sees each part of content;
• Doesn’t jump straight to knowledge checkers and engages with gamification/community;
• Reads articles
Speed runner
• Jumps straight into knowledge checkers;
• Doesn’t see content;
• Only answers knowledge checkers to find the correct results
The learner
• Doesn’t answer tests;
• Only looks at content;
• Misses gamification, no medals/badges
Timed out
• Reads content and answers knowledge checker to earn medals;
• Doesn’t renew test result when updated content is posted;
• Out of date knowledge
Timed out
• Visits site and earns medals and badges;
• Doesn’t return when new content is posted, meaning they’re missing new medals/badges;
User testing
We conducted user research around a few areas of the platform, I believe most interesting was after launch, we received feedback that there were too many navigation items in the menu. A big part of this was from the original client with scope creep and being unable to move deadlines, leaving extra pages added as secondary thoughts without a true information architecture being retaken into review.
So on initial launch, the menu ended up with 10 items, which users felt was too much with some titles being to ambiguous and feeling more like they had to hunt through the navigation, rather than knowing at a glance where to go when they knew what they were looking for.
Financial fitness assessment
An interesting challenge we had to overcome was that people generally do not know where they land on the financial knowledge spectrum. We found there are four groups people will usually fit into when it comes to estimating their financial knowledge.
Novice
• Sees each part of content;
• Doesn’t jump straight to knowledge checkers and engages with gamification/community;
• Reads articles
Ignorance
• Jumps straight into knowledge checkers;
• Doesn’t see content;
• Only answers knowledge checkers to find the correct results
Cultured
• Doesn’t answer tests;
• Only looks at content;
• Misses gamification, no medals/badges
Expert
• Reads content and answers knowledge checker to earn medals;
• Doesn’t renew test result when updated content is posted;
• Out of date knowledge
The need for simplicity
With financial lessons, it's easy to overload the user with too much information and options of ways to learn. It became blatantly important to keep steps in lessons simpler, and keeping users engaged with images and demonstration videos.
All information, straightaway
More digestible information
More steps, user may become less engaged
Takeaways & Reflections
I really learned a lot from creating this product as there were lots of situations thI thoroughly enjoyed this experience of a true end-to-end process with a client of Shell's calibre. Collaboration was a huge part of this project for me, it really helped push the project to new heights with amazing possibilities, working across multiple teams from creative to engineering and the interactive team.
I'm extremely excited to carry on working with clients and help people create meaningful experiences with technology in new, undiscovered ways.