Day 1 of Avocademy Designathon - Research and empathizing with users

Last week, I participated in the Avocademy designathon, where I partnered up with another recent-graduated UX designer to create a solution based on Avocademy's project brief. We had five days to complete the challenge, plus half a day to create a pitch and record a video to present our solution. I was lucky to have Fernanda Feres, UI/UX Designer, as my partner (check her portfolio by clicking here), she proved to be highly skilled at different design topics, which was great :)

First things first, Avocademy provided three prompts:

- The FinTech Challenge

How might we explore how to improve financial literacy?

- The web3 Challenge

How might we improve accessibility/education of Web3 projects?

- The Metaverse Challenge

How might we intentionally create a better world through the metaverse?

We chose to go with the FinTech prompt because 1) both web3 and metaverse are relatively new topics that we didn't feel comfortable working with in such a short amount of time, and 2) there are many UX/UI job positions from bank, e-commerce, and financial companies, so we thought that it would be nice to add this experience to our portfolio.

Avocademy provided a webinar with a specialist in FinTech, and also a suggested week guide so that the teams could organize themselves accordingly. We pretty much followed it, but also used our previous experience in organizing personal projects schedules.

Day 1 - Monday

Avocademy sent us the project brief at midnight and there would be a kickoff presentation at 1pm, so we decided to organize our life in the morning (meaning "do laundry" lol) because we knew it would be a busy week, and start working on the project after the presentation. I also collected some FigJam productivity templates in the morning and pasted them in a Figma file so that we would kind of get inspired to kick off this project in a very professional manner. So, on day 1, we basically did:

• 1:1 meeting: talk about the prompt, share opinions and thought on financial literacy, discuss what are the next steps;

• Watch the FinTech webinar;

• Research: search for articles, videos, any material on the internet that talks about problems people face regarding financial literacy;

• Competitive Analysis: check what has already been used in the market to understand what users are familiar with, potential opportunities to improve the experience;

• Survey: understand the struggles users face regarding financial education, confidence about investing or being ready for short and long-term financial commitments / needs.

• Affinity Mapping: gather the qualitative insights from survey and organize them into categories to find patterns among the answers.

== Research ==

Our research showed that only one-third of adults understand basic financial concepts worldwide, and 4 in 7 Americans are financially illiterate. Also, 64% of all adults claim that money is a significant stressor, and 63% of Millennials feel anxious when thinking about their financial situation. Therefore, talking about money triggers anxiety in many people in North America.

Sources:

https://www.possiblefinance.com/blog/financial-literacy-statistics/

https://gflec.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/3313-Finlit_Report_FINAL-5.11.16.pdf?x28148

== Competitive Analysis ==

We wanted to understand what has already been done in the market to solve this problem, and found that different platforms are being used to get financial information, such as financial education apps, budget apps, and financial education apps specifically for children.

== Survey ==

We conducted a survey by using Google Forms with 22 participants. We created required open questions to get qualitative data, as well as some checkboxes and linear scale questions to get quantitative data.

The goal was to understand users habits towards financial decisions, struggles related to managing money, how they felt about money in a short and long-term, and if there are any insecurities they might feel towards money. Also, we included a couple of questions related to childhood and money because we wanted to confirm an assumption we had about how learning to deal with money in an early age affects the confidence of a grown-up adult in their financial decisions.

We found out that many users are aware of the importance of investing, but don’t know where to start, specially long-term investments that aim at saving money for retirement. Also, users usually learn about money on-the-go, meaning that they will search a certain piece of information as it shows up in their routine. Finally, investing is they would like to learn about the most.

We then gathered the qualitative insights and organized them into an affinity mapping in order to find patterns where these users are being underserved somehow.

== Day 1 learnings ==

I'm a fan of bullet journaling and this is my main productivity tool. I wake up and write down a list of everything I want to accomplish in that day so that I can cross it out as I complete them (it's such an amazing and satisfying feeling to cross them out lol). With this designathon, I used the suggested scheduled timeline by Avocademy at first, and I wanted to also journal my learnings for each day, even if it's something small or that I already know, so that I could measure my successes and where I can improve in my processes in the future.

1. I should always be mindful and careful about survey questions. There was one where I set out examples for the answers, and I think I kind of influenced the respondents. Overall, however, I think we had great and useful insights to work with.

2. The FigJam templates helped a lot with organization and communication, we had only to read how they work and what the goal was, then provide our information with what we want to do. We could access the file anytime to know what the other was doing.

3. From day one , I could see that Fernanda is sweet and hard worker. She's efficient and explains her research findings very clearly and articulates her ideas really well. She inspires me to practice my verbal communication more and more.

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So that's a wrap for day 1! My next post will walk you through day 2, where we will define our problem and our users.