Project

Objective

The challenge for this year is going to be centered around financial wellbeing, sponsored by Santander Foundation. 

Financial wellbeing is defined as the state in which a person or organization can smoothly manage its current financial obligations and have confidence in its financial future. This includes four elements:

  1. Day-to-day - smooth short-term finances to meet short-term needs

  2. Resilience - absorb financial shocks

  3. Goals - reach future goals

  4. Confidence - feel secure and in control of finances

Financial wellbeing depends on people and organizations acquiring a set of financial skills and knowledge (also known as financial literacy) that allows an individual to make informed and effective decisions with all their financial resources. This includes the ability to understand and effectively use various financial skills, including personal financial management, budgeting, saving, and investing. Financial literacy is fundamental to promoting equity, reducing inequalities, and leveraging a more just and fairer, and inclusive society that progresses without leaving people behind.

Our sponsor Santander Foundation is encouraging activities to promote financial well being and is interested in taking advantage of advanced interactive technologies and user-centered design approaches to leverage financial literacy and promote financial wellbeing. They have an extensive portfolio of online content, training programs and interactive tools that need to be adapted to specific target groups taking advantage of new interactive technologies. Additional contents and tools are also available from the national regulatory agencies such as the bank of Portugal and many others worldwide which you can research for inspiration.

Goals

For your project you will need to start identifying a target user group (typically associated with a life stage) and a focus in terms of the four elements identified above (day-to-day, resilience, goals, or confidence) and then apply the user-centered design and evaluation methods to evolve a solution targeting that specific group and focus using novel interactive technologies that could go from design a mobile app, an interactive website, an interactive kiosk all the way to an augmented or virtual reality experience.

You will have to select your project by combining the target groups and the focus elements as follows:

Vertical header: Tasks
Horizontal header: Target Group		Budget managementSavings plannerInvestment plannerConsumption creditHouse mortgageMitigate inflationRetirement planningHealth insuranceMoving city/country
Students (>18 years)
Young adults starting a job
Adults looking to buy a house
Young adults planning to start a family
Adults facing unemployment
Adults facing health issues
Adults starting/in/ending romantic relationships
Adults planning retirement
Retired adults

You should select your project within this matrix taking into consideration several factors: i) access to users in the target group (e.g., how are you going to be able to recruit subjects to explore the problem space and to test the iterations of your prototypes); ii) combine tasks and target groups that are related and feasible for a 7 week project (e.g. you could consider young adults starting a job with budget management + moving city/country but not house mortgage or investment planner); iii) try to be creative and avoid replicating obvious solutions (e.g. you could consider less obvious solutions like targeting young adults and retirement planning + health insurance as these are also relevant although less obvious). Paint the matrix with the three or four cells that you are interested in exploring in your project. If you only have 2, probably it?s not enough for a good project. If you have more than 4, you?re probably being too ambitious and might run into trouble later.

Solution

This course is about learning user-centered design and evaluation methods and techniques in a context of a real-world challenge. While we do expect that each group presents a high-fidelity concept prototype the technical solution is not what we are aiming at evaluation, rather we will evaluate your ability to apply user-centered design iteratively to explore a problem and drive a creative solution that satisfies the needs, concerns and expectations of your users.

This course is completely agnostic on which technology(s) you choose to illustrate the concept. Each group if free to choose how they plan to implement their project as long as there is substance to what you're trying to achieve (i.e. a trivial replication of an existing solution is not acceptable).

Team formation

This project is conducted in teams or 5 students who need to be enrolled in the same Lab slot; student workers are recommended forming online groups or to join teams that do not mind doing online work. 

For each team, we highly encourage diversity of course backgrounds, nationalities, gender, etc. as this leads to much better results and provides an opportunity to develop new skills:

Teams have freedom to divide the workload as they see fit. One member of the team will need to assume the role of project lead; this role requires good organization and communication skills that can bring a group together and on schedule, while resolving conflicts and communicating with faculty and tutors.

All teams are required to maintain a website where they document their project and post their progress.

Project Activities Outline

  • Week 1 - This brief is distributed before classes start, we expect that you have already formed your group, your ideas discussed within the group, and especially a plan on how you?re going to access your users to start working on your research plan.

  • Week 1 - Research plan: you need to have your target user group selected and the research plan ready (e.g., where, when, and which techniques are you going to use).

  • Week 2 - Analyze the user research and synthesize it by creating personas, scenarios and other models.

  • Week 3 - Concept prototype: brainstorm, ideate, develop, and select the concept to be prototyped in a detailed storyboard where your personas are engaging in scenarios and hinting towards solutions. (First Assessment - see schedule)

  • Week 4 - Low-fidelity prototype and first-round of testing: develop and present a paper prototype of selected scenarios, hinting at the platforms/media you will use to implement the solution. Evaluate the prototype.

  • Week 5 - Iterative prototype  (increasing level of detail) and continuous testing: develop and present a prototype integrating the evaluation results of week 4. Evaluate the prototype. Repeat cycles of iteration and testing, until you reach a high fidelity prototype. (Second Assessment - see schedule)

  • Week 6 - High-fidelity prototype evaluation & refinement: develop the high-fidelity prototype, do a formal evaluation of the prototype and iterate based on findings.

  • Week 7 - Final presentations, including all the deliverables.

  • Final report to be delivered to the professors and then to the client sponsor.


Each team is responsible for making a website to document their process and the project deliverables. In addition to presentations/videos, the website should host/link to supplementary materials that the instructors might need to evaluate the work developed in the course and for the client to understand the work.

Resources