BACKGROUND
Undergraduate Capstone Course - Client Project
TIME
15 Weeks,
Jan - Apr 2023
TEAM
Sihan Wu - Design Lead, Client Outreach
April Wu - Project Manager
Hailey Jeong - Research Lead, Designer
Junwoo Cheong - Designer, Documentation
As the Design Lead, I drove innovation by defining the main user flow, information architecture, and pushing for research-driven design iterations. I led holistic reflections to refine the design narrative and worked with my co-lead to develop a fully established design system with interactive prototypes.
Jonathan Bernstein
Financial Planner and Investment Manager, Previously Director of Research at Hefren-Tillotson
Ganesh Mani
Adjunct Professor of Innovation Practice at the CMU Tepper School of Business
Our clients came to us with the question: "How might we empower Americans to better prepare them for retirement?" According to the Census, 55% of Americans today are behind on saving for retirement. Not saving enough for retirement is a national crisis that needs attention. They wanted us to pinpoint a demographic needing retirement planning awareness and craft a tool to empower them.
Re:magine
Retirement Imagining
Re:magine is an online planning tool that targets Older Millennials and Gen X, urging them to set and track personalized retirement goals, assess readiness, and explore planning resources.
De-Mystifying Retirement Planning
Tailored onboarding questions about retirement preferences and financial goals.
Vision Building
Highly personalized vision recommendations to guide and inspire personal goals.
Progress Tracking
Tracking retirement readiness in savings and recommending actionable items.
Resources Forum
Participate in forum discussions and find helpful planning resources.
Phase 1
How might we empower Americans so that they are better prepared for their retirement?
Our client came to us with their hypothesis: by visualizing the expected spending during retirement as well as the intended retirement lifestyle, people will be motivated to proactively prepare for their retirement. We began researching to better understand the discussion around retirement, and to identify a group of people that can benefit the most from such a planning tool.
Identify a specific group of Americans who can be assisted to better prepare for retirement
Understand the necessary factors to help people plan for retirement
Examine the target group users' attitude surrounding retirement
There is a lack of personalization and emotional preparation in retirement planning.
We spoke with financial analysts during our stakeholder interviews and came away with a consensus that currently the emotional needs of their clients are not being addressed. We then looked at existing retirement planning tools and confirmed their observation as most tools focus on calculating the numbers.
Having foresight and starting early are important factors in becoming prepared.
In our conversations with domain experts, we heard several agree that starting to plan early is important to retiring successfully. We also found from guerrilla research that despite people being in various stages of the planning process, most agreed that planning early set a good foundation.
High priority is placed on feeling fulfilled and contributing to community during retirement.
In guerrilla research and potential user interviews, we got to learn more about what the average person prioritizes when it comes to retirement. Many participants mentioned they want to feel a sense of fulfillment and stay close to their community during retirement.
How can we better prepare those who are 15-20 years away from retirement to transition emotionally and financially for this new phase of life?
After analyzing our research, we pinpointed our target users to those who were 15-20 years away from retirement (i.e. Gen-X and older millennials): they not only have the means to make effective retirement decisions, but they also have gone through major life events such as marriage to make more informed decisions and planning.
Phase 2
We identified 3 main user needs from previous research insights:
1.
Help users achieve balance between their financial and emotional needs
2.
Foster a social and collaborative environment for planning
3.
Ensure personalization and customization
We brainstormed as a team and created 2 storyboard ideas for each need for speed dating with users.
People valued guidance and social collaboration in the planning process.
From speed dating with 5 target user group participants, we found that people gravitated towards a collaborative but still highly personalized experience.
Participants found it difficult to plan for this vast phase of life, but saw value in having a community where they could sought out advice and having a tool to help them structure and ground their goals with finances.
We decided to create a social platform that provides online space for the people to learn about retirement from socializing with other potential retirees.
We imagined a mobile social app that will allow users to foster connections with other people, get advice from retirees and, showcase their individual journey in the planning process.
Wireframe Explorations
We first sketched some designs for the main features we envisioned:
Then we created low-fi wireframes based on the main flow:
Home Page
dashboard-like summary of the user’s planning progress based on finances and goal setting
create and edit retirement goals
Discussion Feature
provides the users with various resources, such as forums and topic specific chat rooms.
Home Page and Community Forum
Vision Feed and User Profile
Vision Feed
source of inspiration where people can view and post their visions
Discuss visions with others in the comments section
User Profile
Allows for personalization
Overview of the user's vision board
Users found a lack of connection between the socializing and envisioning aspects of the app.
From our think aloud testing with 6 participants, we mainly found that our designs overlooked various user needs. Participants indicated the weak connection between the social and envisioning features, and noted that they were more interested in envisioning their own path rather than comparing with others.
A social app may not be an effective way to address our main user needs.
After seeing the user testing results, we wanted to backtrack and reconsider our design direction. We re-evaluated all the previous research and ideation work so far and tried to see if there are recurring user needs we may have overlooked.
Let's incentivize retirement planning by shifting the mindset around retirement to make it more achievable and easier to understand.
We decided to re-imagine the direction of our project, instead of focusing on social aspects, we wanted to focus on encouraging users by shifting the daunting mindset around retirement planning.
Features for Revised Direction
We also shifted from a mobile approach to a desktop one, recognizing that a mobile app suggests an unnecessary need for frequent engagement. Realistically, our users would not need to be actively planning for retirement on a daily basis, but only once in a while to see if they are on track.
Phase 3
Revised Wireframes
We revised the site map, breaking down the experience from onboarding leading into 3 main features.
Onboarding Process
personalizes the app’s resources for the user
prompts user to describe their ideal retirement with keywords
prompts user to enter and track financial data
Onboarding
Personal Dashboard
tracks the user's overall progress in retirement planning
overview of their savings and investment amounts
allows for creating and reviewing goals
Dashboard
Vision Wall
allows users to explore photo inspirations tailored to their retirement keywords
users can save photos that they like into their own vision board
Vision Wall
Resources Forum
allows users to connect with relevant resources on planning
see discussion posts by topic or look up educational resources
Resources
Users expressed preference for more guidance and emotional assurance in the planning process.
Using our revised wireframes, we conducted think aloud testing with 5 participants. Many users felt that the platform could appeal more to their emotions and offer guidance.
Insight
Users wanted the platform to have less emphasis on numbers: statistics can be separate from the visioning process so the experience feels less restrictive.
Design Opportunity
More questions related to emotions during the onboarding process.
Insight
There is still an absence of reassurance and guidance in the experience, users expressed having a learning curve to use the site.
Design Opportunity
Having a starter tutorial for first time users, walk them through the goal setting process step by step.
Insight
Many users were confused by the process of saving photos to a vision board: they highlighted that the connection between the photos and the vision board was weak.
Design Opportunity
Allowing visions and goal setting to have a closer association, reserving the vision exploration to be the brainstorming aid for goal setting.
High Fidelity Prototype
With our newest user testing results, we felt more confident moving onto the next stage. While creating the high-fidelity prototype, we considered these changes:
Adding a tutorial feature after onboarding to provide more guidance and reassurance for the user
Connecting vision saving to be the brainstorming part of goal setting.
Having less emphasis on numbers in the overall experience and use copy + design language that appeals to emotions.
Revised Flow for High-Fidelity
Visual Style Guide
Before prototyping, the design leads crafted the visual style guide for the next stage. We wanted the site's voice and tone to be friendly, contemporary, and trustworthy. We came up with a site mascot called Retty the Piggy Bank, an avatar that represents the platform and emotionally engages the user. We chose a simple color scheme with complementary colors: using a clean backdrop to emphasize the colorful vision board photos, and using complementary colors to indicate whether the user is on track v.s. in need to work on planning more.
Design System
We also created site components based on our established design system before diving deep into prototyping so our team can design with consistency and flexibility.
Prototype Demo
Onboarding
Personalization
Onboarding Survey and Brainstorm Activities
Vision Building
Guidance & Assistance
First Timer Tutorial and Easy to Pick Up UI System
Highly Customizable
Create and Realize Your Retirement Visions
Progress Tracking
Monitor Personal Growth
Indicator for Retirement Preparedness
Resources Forum
Education and Discussion
Ask Questions and Receive Recommended Resources
Users felt a sense of guidance and felt inspired to start thinking about retirement.
We tested with 12 participants for our final user testing. Overall, we found some improvements in our designs when it comes to addressing user needs.
Insight 1
Users wanted to see more information on how to bridge the gap between their goals and reality.
Insight 2
60% of users expressed their needs and preferences were well met by using the platform.
Finale
Impact
We emphasized balance and personalization in our final product:
achieving a sense of balance between financial and emotional factors.
personalizing the experience to ensure that the solution is relevant to their personal situations (i.e. adequately accounting for their needs).
By shifting the mindset around retirement planning, we discovered potential directions to let our client inspire and educate more people in hopes of improving the retirement planning crisis today.
How Our Solution Relates to the Expectancy-Value Theory
In addition to our research insights and final prototype, we also devised a future roadmap for our client, giving them suggestions on how they can expand the project through more user testing and design iterations.
Takeaways
This project started with a broad problem to solve. We tackled it one step at a time, narrowing down our focus along the way. Despite facing challenges, we worked well together as a team and learned from each other to deliver our best work. Through this project, I gained valuable experience in creating something from scratch: going from a question, to doing extensive research, and finally designing the finished solution. From working with our client and talking to stakeholders, I felt motivated by the fact that we are making something to potentially address real world problems and create impact.
