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)
ROLE
UX Designer, Lead Researcher
CLIENT
Goldman Sachs
TEAMMATES
Sunwoo Park, Jin Hee Jung, Sukyong Kwon
TOOL
-Figma
-Miro
-Adobe creative cloud
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
Summary
VALANCE helps users to invest consciously and care about environment by providing a temperature scale of how their investments have impacted the nature
Design Process
We used the 4D approach to design our product — Define, Discover, Design, and Deploy
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It was not a linear process as a lot of revisions and back & forth were involved in each stage. Moving ahead in the learning stage, we even redefined our design challenge by understanding the depth of the issue.
Define the challenge
Discover the needs
Design the solution
Deploy the solution
Challenge prompt from our sponsor Goldman Sachs
"
How might we create a path for Millennials and GenZ individuals to invest in social issues that they are passionate about?
"
Define
Narrow down the scope and define a problem statement
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The challenge prompt given by our sponsor Goldman Sachs was broad in a way that social issues were numerous with different scales and importance.
Context Research
We studied the traits of Millenials & GenZ to understand their mindset and some stats about the user group.
Socially Conscious
Digital Native
Prioritizing sustainable choices
Millenials & GenZ %
in the USA population
42.42 %
Millennials and Gen Z became key generations in the US election
of the US labor force is millennials
35%
Discover
User Interviews
Research Goals
Research Methods
In order to narrow down our scope, it was necessary to actually understand the pain points and priorities by talking with the user spectrum group. This is where we entered the discovery stage.
Secondary research revealed the comprehensive aspects of science, sociology, economics, and technology regarding sustainability.
We conducted 13 qualitative user interviews to discover their needs and obstacles.
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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
> Semi-structured Interviews
Starting with background questions and comforting them that there are no right/ wrong answers, we designed the sequence in a way to have a room for follow-up questions
>Collaboration tools
To break a typical QA format of an interview, we designed 3 simple activities to make the session more interactive.
1. Card sorting activity: To identify their top 3-5 issues
2. Number Scale slider: Amount they are willing to spend for solving the selected issue
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3. Useful/ Non-useful segregation: Depending on whether the mode is useful or not
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>Color coding
Color coding the transcripts helped us to identify different key points from the conversations.
Interview Highlights
1. Return: Less return when it comes to social issues investment on a personal basis, which tends to deter people to start investing in those issues
2. Transparency: Investor wants to know where their money is invested, especially in a social issue
3. Validation: To have a feeling that they actually helped others/ the community through investing
4. Platform: People use various platforms depending on the nature of the investment
Social Issues
Sources of financial information
Synthesis
Goldman Sachs' advisors provided continuous feedback and managed the progress of our project throughout the discovery stage. To analyze the data in a better way, we used affinity mapping to find links and a pattern in the collected data. Climate change was the biggest concern in social issues and it was indicated that parents and friends still act as major influence when it comes to taking financial decisions.
Revised Challenge Prompt
"
How might we create an accessible financial platform for Millennials and GenZ who wish to invest in climate sustainability?
"
User behavior
After studying the behavior of the people who invest and who were likely to invest, we thought of taking the ‘Interests’ as prompts for investing.
We could successfully link the interests of people to socially responsible investments and be above the action line.
For eg.- One of our interviewees was passionate about traveling and exploring; that interest in traveling could act as a prompt into sustainable investment.
Our Solution
Make a big change with small investments
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Establishing the Green Industry to be economical -
Empowering the youth financially -
Viable environmental actions
Design
Charging motivation
To motivate users, we used cognitive design patterns of Value attribution and Priming Effect
Value attribution
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Priming Effect
User Persona
Standing in the market
We compared the competitors and designed our product to suit the users in the best possible way.
Main features of the app
1. Onboarding
- Providing specific questions including environmental issues and financial goals.
- Helping users get involved in the service in the first place
2. Learning resource
- Being packed with ample learning resources for beginners to get started
3. Investing
- Providing company stocks in a list tailored to the user’s preference and category
- Green temperature scale which reflects user’s investment as a direct impact
4. Sharing option
- Share financial interests realted to social causes with your friends and family
5. Green Donation
Offering an exclusive donation and funds option
Deploy
This phase involved the components of business plans and revenue model for our product.
Finance & Market size
$ 225K
Setup cost:
It includes backend, native app development, app design, Quality assurance, Licensing, project management, Intellectual Property, Business analysis, hosting cloud and running cost of the cloud.
140.8 Million
Millenials & GenZ resident population in the US
Reflections
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User testing during the prototype stage proved to be quite useful, thus keeping the user involved in the process and not designing something out of the way.
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Learned to use different synthesis frameworks apart from mapping the customer journey
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A lot of back-and-forths were involved especially in the prototyping stage. It was quite a challenge for the team members to implement the design changes and prioritize which changes to make for the next versions after the user testing results.
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Focusing on the scope for the MVP of the app took a lot of time, which was the primary result of the research stage.
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Team coordination and dividing the work responsibilities helped to complete the project within the timeline.
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Our original plan was to include an elaborate virtual simulator and a monetary incentive system for users to invest, but these could not make it into the MVP plan after feedback from users. It was rather crucial to focus on the social issue and sustainability factor of our app.