Team
Bright Hoang
Valeria Fierro
Lana Vuong
Matt Dietzman
Sophia Mai (me!)
Timeline
32 weeks
Tools
FigJam
Figma
Google Forms
Overview
CacheMoola was designed in a team of six as a eight-month long project as part of Design for America, a non-profit organization focused on using Human-Centered Design (HCD) to address real-world social challenges.
My team designed a platform that serves as a resource to help Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) learn more about the fundamentals of financial literacy.
Impact
I learned a lot about ed-tech and finance, which are both topics I'm interested in. This is the longest project I've worked on to-date, so I was also able to further develop my design and teamwork skills.
Gen Z's Financial Struggles
Despite making up 27% of the workforce by 2025, over a quarter of Generation Z have reported lacking confidence with their financial literacy, making them the most financially unconfident generation. This can be seen in Gen Z’s spending and investing habits: 57% of Gen Z individuals prefer a savings account as their go-to investment method.
We want to bridge this gap and create a solution that introduces important financial concepts to Gen Z early in their financial journeys and set them up for financial success.
Introducing: $avr.
$avr. is a learning app that simulates the process of managing your personal finances in the real world: getting “paid” by completing engaging and informative learning modules that teach them about financial literacy skills and distributing your money into different accounts, such as savings, investments, retirement, etc., based on your financial goals.
Competitive Analysis
Through competitive analysis, we learned that educational competitors, like TikTok, Youtube, AI, in-person workshops, classes, etc., are effective, but there's a lot of conflicting/wrong information.
Furthermore, existing apps/resources (ie. Wealthfront, Nerdwallet) were designed mostly for those with more knowledge about financial literacy, which can be confusing for those with little/no prior knowledge.
Lastly, apps targeted at beginners/Gen Z often lack helpful content/limit possible engagement for users.
Surveys
“I’m not confident enough to teach others about financial literacy.”
Our team conducted one round of surveys, where we gathered broad insights from a large sample (127 survey responses!) in order to gain key insights, such as common trends, behaviors, and pain points.
We focused on identifying familiarity with financial literacy and resources, and specific struggles that prevents them from learning.
Interviews
We conducted interviews to gain deeper, more personal insights into Gen Z’s relationship with financial literacy. These one-on-one conversations allowed us to explore emotional responses, motivations, and specific challenges that couldn’t be fully captured through surveys alone.
Participants were recruited through our online survey, where respondents were invited to opt in for a follow-up interview. This approach ensured we connected with individuals who were both engaged and willing to share more detailed perspectives.
User Research Findings
Overall, participants were were generally not very knowledgable, but had clear interest in learning about personal finance, despite challenges like conflicting/impersonal information, feeling like they didn’t have enough money, etc.
They were looking for hands-on, digestible, engaging, and practical learning, clear step-by-step guidance, and reliable information tailored to their own financial situations.
How might we...
Support Generation Z in developing a stronger understanding and confidence in their personal financial literacy, especially with investing, by making the learning process fun and engaging?
Ideation
Based on our user research, we conducted an ideation method called crazy 8's, where we each came up with 8 solutions in 8 minutes.
Some ideas we came up with were: a policy to teach financial literacy in high schools, a tracking widget to keep track of expenses, and an app that allows users to see their friends' spending activity.
However, we decided on a learning app, with a micro-investing aspect to allow users to gain experience with investing with less (but still real) money, and interactive learning modules.
Wireframing
After establishing that we wanted to focus on micro-investing and learning modules, we created wireframes and low-fidelity mockups, considering both how these features worked independently, and how they worked together.
Based on our user research, we thought to "inflate" the amount of money in the user’s in-app portfolio in hopes of motivate users to invest more money.
Pivoting Away from Micro-Investing
After user testing, we reached a major turning point in our design process, where we made the decision to have users invest fake in-app money instead.
Both user research/testing and our design explorations indicated that investing real money and a learning app was daunting for people inexperienced in finances.
Because of this, we chose to prioritize the learning modules and switch to paper trading, which allows us to directly reward users for completing learning modules and make our app more approachable.
Iterations
Based on some other feedback we received during user testing, we changed the wording of our questions and prompting screens to make users feel less pressured and added interactive post-module activities to avoid quiz format redundancy.
By switching to fake money only, we were able to eliminate the complex features/language and risk that came with investing real money.
To connect the learning modules and paper trading features of our app, users are only able to unlock the simulated financial products, like checking, investments, and retirement accounts, once they’ve completed the respective learning module, encouraging users to practice and build their confidence in investing in real life.
Final Design
What I Learned
Do literature reviews!
Our main critique during our project showcase was that we needed to conduct more literature review, to see if there are already proven ways to effectively teach information through a mobile app. After I received this feedback, I reviewed several research papers that supported the format of our learning modules, but in future projects, I will definitely conduct literature reviews to ensure that the solutions I'm trying to design actually work.
Plan out user flows early on.
We rushed immediately to doing low/mid-fidelity without planning our user flows out thoroughly because we were a bit pinched for time, but that ended up making it significantly more difficult to design our app because there were issues (like the micro-investing or disconnection of the learning modules and paper-trading) that we didn't realize until after we'd done user testing.
Add color and fun!
During the earlier iterations of our user interface, half of our team wanted to go for a more modern and sleek look, but we eventually all agreed that adding a little character (yay piggy!) and some color makes the interface much more engaging and enjoyable :)
i'd love to chat about good food, books, or anything at all! ˚ ⋆｡˚ ❀