Morningstar - Vital Signs

For this prototype, we set out to create a simple and efficient method for household financial statement analysis. We know from research and our user interviews that, generally, people are very intimated by money and have a lot of fear about whether or not they’re doing ok. There are lots of complex tools out there for household finances, but very few that cater to investors who aren’t financially sophisticated.

The aim was to focus on information that was easy to measure, easy to understand and immediately useful. We wanted to create a tool that was accessible for the novice but illuminating for the expert. And our objective was to help investors overcome some of their fears about money by simplifying the information.

User Problems

“I look at all our numbers - money coming in and money going out - and I don’t know what to make of it all. I just want someone to tell me if we’re doing ok.” - quote from a user interview

“Investing is like jumping into a statistics class when you don’t remember algebra. There’s so many building pieces that you don’t have that you need just to understand the basics.” - quote from a user interview

Competitive Research

I started by researching our competitors in the personal finance space. Although we weren’t building an entire robo-advising experience, I also researched how those applications addressed financial health.

Research

I interviewed investors via usertesting.com to get a better sense of what aspects of personal finance were confusing or induced anxiety and what goals they had set for themselves. Our team also did secondary research to better understand the different demographic groups we’d be serving. I was able to draw upon my user research, as well as a list of typologies the marketing team had created in conjunction with Atlantic 57, to create some potential user profiles that we used to help guide us in the design process. I wanted the profiles to be simple enough that, at a glance, any stakeholder could understand our target audience.

Design Discovery

I conducted design thinking workshops to explore how we might implement this methodology and created a high-level user flow. We started with a lot of good ideas, but no cohesive story to tell users, so I organized some white-boarding sessions with the stakeholders to ideate on these ideas. Then, we created a simple interactive excel prototype to gather feedback from internal stakeholders. I used the outputs of these sessions and research to prioritize user stories and functionality for an MVP prototype.

Design Iteration

As the methodology solidified, I began designing possible solutions and got feedback from my team and the design leadership. These designs went through several iterations, examples of which are shown below.

Outcome

After getting stakeholder buy-in, I built out the mock-ups shown below. I ran a moderated user test of the concept via UserZoom to see if the designs were resonating with potential users who fit our “Learner” typology. After incorporating feedback from users, I worked with our developers to build out a coded prototype. We defined success by measuring how long it would take users to enter their personal information (goal of 15 mins or less) and also asking a series of Likert scale questions around the usefulness of the tool. We are currently working with a product team to incorporate our experience into a larger experience.