Back to Finance
Role (Solo): Brand Identity, Design Research, UI Design, UX Design, Web Design
Back to Finance is a budgeting and informational website ideation that served as my senior capstone project at SPU. The goal of the website was to tackle financial illiteracy and fill a gap left by inadequate financial education in the school system.
Inspiration and Challenge
Inspired by my own personal experiences growing up in a low-income immigrant household, I knew that financial illiteracy was an issue that I wanted to tackle. One of the biggest challenges to this project was narrowing down the specific issues that leads to financial illiteracy. Upon further research and user interviews, it was clear that the reason why Americans are turning to Google for financial advice is because there is a vicious cycle of inadequate education which trickles down from generation to generation, particularly in more marginalized communities such as those of immigrant, ethnic minority, and lower-class households.
Budgeting Tool
While originally just an educational website, a budgeting tool was later added after further ideation. The budgeting tool is the most prominent example of human-centered design in this project. There are many similar tools out there for users to keep track of expenses including apps that work in conjunction with their bank accounts. However, this digital budgeting tool is different because it lets the user see visual changes in real time as they adjust their inputs. This psychologically sends the user a message that the changes they make have tangible results.
Informative Topics
Most people don’t know how to handle specific financial problems until they are forced to deal with them. This creates a system of trial and error. The problem with trial and error is that in finance, errors are literally quite costly. This is why I came up with the idea to have a series of articles in which the users can read through in preparation to tackle potential problems.
