Troutwood is a fin-tech education startup incubated in 2019 from the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship. Today, hundreds of college and high school students came to use the app following the founder’s outreach talks; many making their first financial plans in their lives. However, few users remained after that. I hence started my work with a pressing goal: to help this young startup establish an active, retaining user base.

The product team was continuously pushing out new features and designs - badges, mascots, merchandises, upgrades. Joining the team with 4 other designers in my capstone team, we hit a pause button and tried to pinpoint what caused the user drop-off.

I took a comprehensive scan to understand TW, their products and target users. In the first month, firm-wide stakeholder interviews were kicked off in parallel with extensive user research. I orchestrated multiple rounds of interviews and usability study to learn about TW’s target population, particularly their perceptions and habits associated with personal finance.

Usability issues of the app started to surface, but more surprising was the drastically different views our potential users embrace  - for them, making a financial plan feels unwelcoming, non-urgent, and overly-complex. This realization led us to a pivotal understanding: the crux of our product design would be to engineer an entirely different way for these twenty-somethings to feel and think about financial planning.

We recognized that, in the ideal, financial planning should be welcoming, actionable and emotionally joyful to the younger generations. We spent quite some efforts delineating our product vision to TW and get our insights across. From there, we won full support to dedicate our time onto redesigning a TW app 2.0; most importantly, end-users’ needs will be put into spotlight in our design and development.

Keeping up with the momentum, we needed to translate a desirable, ambitious future into a viable roadmap. At this stage, I had to balance expectations, values and feasibilities the entire time, so I spearheaded numerous generative design workshops and vision mapping activities with both stakeholders and end-users. Bringing these people into the center of my process was extremely helpful — these collective efforts informed our information architecture and feature roadmap.

The chaos of working on a 5-designer team made the prototyping process uniquely challenging. Even though I had laid out the information architecture, inevitably, we all had our own pictures in mind how the features would be carried out. As a result, we usually got drawn into endless streams of thoughts and debates that ate up our time and team morale.

I constantly experimented our ways-of-working. Eventually, we followed a 5-day-sprint, inspired by Google, where we experiment in sub-groups but synthesize and make plans together. We were able to make progress by testing a lot of hypothesis while building alignment. I am still amazed by how worthwhile it is to keep evolving collaboration mechanisms to bring the best solutions.

We made a lot of changes in the redesign, with the biggest accomplishments being redefining TW’s ‘planning’ flow, and empowering people’s emotional journeys by applying behavioral change theories.
‍
Financial planning deconstructed
‍Before, the way that ‘financial planning’ worked on TW was to literally generate plans for users entering basic information like age and income. There were a lot of problems that stopped users from effectively using this key feature. [fig1]

Now, financial planning was deconstructed into insights, actions and learning, which is substantially more aligned with the mental model of our target population. This reframing brought to fruition more understandable feature flows and information hierarchy on a platform level. [fig2-3]

‍Designing for behavioral change
Behavioral change techniques has been commonly used in health and fitness related products, but it could also bring magic in the world of finance. The idea was manifested in all the details of my design — from adding an onboarding step that asks people of their objectives (where the purpose is really to create a moment to reflect on personal values and increase self awareness) to a gamified learning widget that provides an easy way to engage in learning.

When the capstone project ended after 6 months of collaboration, Troutwood's active user based had grown 4x since we started. It was amazing evidence of success in addressing user desirability problems. By innovating TW’s design and development process, we managed to find a sweet spot in creating what financial advisors advise, what schools administrators pay for, and what young users want. The spirit of close, fast-paced collaboration and user-centricity will continue to influence my future works.