Valance
A platform for Millenials and GenZ who wish to invest in climate sustainability.
Project
Background
My team worked with Goldman Sachs, our sponsor, to create a way for Millenials and GenZ to invest in social issues they care about in the US with product & service design in 15 weeks.
ACHIEVEMENT
1st Place in Strategic Innovation in Product & Service Design Case (Fall 2022)
CLIENT
Goldman Sachs Group
TEAMMATES
Sunwoo Park, Jin Hee Jung, Sukyong Kwon
INDUSTRY MENTORS
Roger Mader, Criswell Lappin, Olivia Greco, Bowen Shen, Liz Wang, Rafael Wagner Poloni
TOOL
-Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud (Design)
-Miro (Brainstorming)
-Zoom (Virtual meets)
DATE
Sept- Dec 2022 (15 weeks)
My Role
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Set responsibilities of each team member and coordinated with instructors and sponsor
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Conducted secondary research, 13 user interviews, and 1 expert interview
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Synthesized insights and turned them into viable design ideas
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Created storyboards to visualize solutions and final pitching presentation video.
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Designed the business model with a tentative forecast
Design Challenge from Goldman Sachs
"
How might we create a path for Millennials and GenZ individuals to invest in social issues that they are passionate about?
"
Solution Summary
Gen Z and millennials are deeply concerned about climate change but often lack accessible ways to make a financial impact. Valance bridges this gap by empowering them to invest in sustainable industries, turning small investments into meaningful environmental action.
1. Onboarding Process:
The investment journey was personalized by allowing users to select sustainability issues they care about, ensuring tailored company recommendations. This seamless flow guides users from awareness to action, making sustainable investing more intuitive.
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Design Decisions:
I prioritized a clean, engaging UI with minimal cognitive load, using progressive disclosure to avoid overwhelming users. Visual hierarchy and interactive elements were designed to make sustainability choices feel impactful while maintaining a familiar financial app experience.
2. Resource Page:
The Resource Page equips users with essential financial knowledge through tutorials, stories, and articles, fostering informed investment decisions. A stock market simulator (in development) will further help beginners gain confidence by practicing in a risk-free environment.
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Design Decisions:
I focused on an intuitive content layout with categorized sections for easy navigation, ensuring accessibility for both beginners and experienced investors. Interactive elements, such as progress tracking and bite-sized learning modules, enhance engagement and encourage continuous learning.
3. Market Page:
The Market Page presents curated stocks and categorized investment options in a tile carousel, helping users discover opportunities aligned with their interests. Three key sections—Stocks, Donations, and Funds—offer diverse ways to engage, leading seamlessly into the investment process.
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Design Decisions:
I structured the page for easy exploration, balancing financial data with sustainability insights to keep users engaged. The company details page includes a chart toggle, ESG ratings, and essential stock data, ensuring transparency. A step-by-step investment flow simplifies stock purchasing, culminating in a Green Impact Meter that visually reinforces the user’s positive environmental contribution.
4. Adding Stock to a List:
Users can categorize stocks into custom lists based on sustainability themes, such as "Global Warming Solutions," making it easier to track and manage investments. This feature functions like a "Save" option in social apps, allowing quick access to preferred stocks.
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Design Decisions:
I implemented a familiar "star" icon in the top-right corner maintaining a lightweight, non-intrusive UI.
5. Sharing Stock Lists:
Users can share their curated stock lists with friends or contacts outside the app, making investing a more collaborative experience. This feature helps beginners gain confidence by seeking opinions before making financial decisions, reducing the pressure of investing alone.
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Design Decisions:
I used a minimalistic design pattern of a single-click share icon, to avoid clutter and ensure the feature is easy to access.
Design Process
The design process for Valance followed a user-centered approach, leveraging both qualitative and quantitative research to ensure the solution addressed real user needs. The challenge was broad—making sustainable investing accessible for Gen Z and millennials—so I employed structured research, iterative design, and usability testing to refine the experience. The 4D framework—Discover, Define, Design, Develop—helped guide this process systematically, ensuring that insights translated into a meaningful and engaging product.
1.Discover
Understanding the Challenge & Research
The first step involved understanding the problem space and gathering insights from real users. The demographics exhibited the following traits of being socially conscious, digital natives and prioritizing personal value.
Socially Conscious
Millenials & GenZ %
in the USA population
42.42 %
Millennials and Gen Z became key generations in the US election
Digital Native
Prioritizing Personal Value
of the US labor force is millennials
35%
Research Goals
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Understand their motivation in solving a social issue
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Their tendency to invest money for achieving sustainability
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Factors which affect their choices and how they prioritize things
Research Methods
Semi-structured Interviews
We conducted 13 qualitative user interviews to discover their needs and obstacles. We started with background questions and comforted them that there were no right or wrong answers. Then, we designed the sequence to allow for follow-up questions. To break the typical QA format of an interview, three simple activities were designed to make the session more interactive.
1. Card sorting activity: To identify their top 3 concerns
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2. Number Scale slider: Amount they were willing to spend for solving the selected issue
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3. Useful/ Non-useful segregation: Depending on whether the mode of information was useful or not
Survey
A survey with a sample of 77 diverse individuals in the GenZ and millennial age groups presented the necessary statistics to narrow down the design challenge
Research Insights
Through color-coded analysis of interviews and research findings, we identified core themes shaping investment behavior among Gen Z and millennials.
1. Return Concerns
Users hesitate to invest in social causes due to perceived lower financial returns
3. Impact Validation
Users seek proof that their money is making a real difference
2. Need for Transparency
Users want clear visibility into where their money is going
4. Platform Preference
Users currently rely on different platforms to know information based on investment type
2.Define
Synthesizing Insights & Problem Framing
With research insights collected, the next step was to synthesize findings and narrow down the problem statement. Research insights were organized into themes, identifying core pain points and opportunities in the affinity mapping exercise.
Revised Challenge Prompt
"
How might we create an accessible financial platform for Millennials and GenZ who wish to invest in climate sustainability?
"
User Persona
Developed a data-driven persona representing a Gen Z investor, highlighting goals, frustrations, and motivations.
Competitor Standing
Our competitve analysis revealed that most competitors lacked a strong focus on social-impact-driven investing. To differentiate Valance, we positioned it as a socially conscious, beginner-friendly platform, ensuring users could invest with both financial confidence and ethical impact.
3.Design
Conceptualization & Ideation
In the Concept Planning phase, four core ideas were identified to drive the design direction of the app. These principles were directly aligned with key research insights:
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Making a Big Change with Small Investments
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Establishing the Green Industry as Economical
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Empowering the Youth Financially
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Enabling Viable Environmental Actions
Workflow Mapping
Following concept planning, workflow mapping was carried out to structure the app's information architecture and define key workflows.
(Click the image to enlarge)
Ideation
Techniques like Crazy 8 and mental modeling were used to generate a wide range of ideas and organize the user journey. These exercises helped visualize different user interactions and content flow, refining the app's features and layout.
User Testing Session
User testing was carried out using Zoom sessions with 3 rounds of 4 participants and stakeholders, where early prototypes were presented to gather feedback. These sessions provided insights into how users interacted with the app, their preferences, and identified areas for improvement, leading to further refinement of the design.
4.Develop
Refinement & High-Fidelity Designs
The focus in this stage was on refining the design and establishing a scalable UI system to ensure consistency and adaptability. The transition from low-fidelity wireframes to high-fidelity designs was carefully executed, incorporating user feedback and usability insights. This step ensured that the final interface maintained visual clarity, accessibility and core principles of design.
Few of the main design screens are shown below to highlight the design process from start to final design.
Initial sketch
Low fidelity wireframe
Final Design
Initial sketch
Low fidelity wireframe
Final Design
Initial sketch
Low fidelity wireframe
Final Design
Finance & Market size
The estimated setup cost of $225K was accounted for development, design, quality assurance, licensing, project management, IP, and cloud hosting. With 140.8M Millennials and Gen Z in the U.S., Valance holds strong market potential as a socially conscious investment platform.
$ 225K
Setup cost
140.8 Million
Millenials & GenZ resident population in the US
Reflections
Navigating the prototyping phase was a learning experience
Project completion in due time felt like a real challenge due to multiple back-and-forths. ​Honestly, there were a lot of iterations during prototyping. It was tough for the team sometimes to keep up with the changes and prioritize what to tackle next after each round of user feedback.
Pinpointing the MVP scope took a while, but it was crucial and stemmed directly from our research.​​
Communication is paramount
Clear and consistent communication within the team was essential, especially when dealing with tight deadlines and shifting priorities. Learning to articulate design decisions and give/receive constructive feedback was a huge part of this project.
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