Service Design Project completed for IDEO's Last Mile Money Design Sprint. The goal was to design financial products for rural families to build Digital Confidence

UX Research

Service Design

Wish - इच्छा

2022

Project brief

Financial Products have historically been designed for individuals, regardless of the fact that finances are actually managed in groups, especially when looking at families who depend on each others’ earnings. When looking at rural families, one of the most significant expenses is marriage, requiring a family to save together for an extended period of time or take out loans. As such, families often turn to money lenders who might charge interest rates closer to 40% or more per year. Which leads us to the problem statement, How can we help rural families save for milestone events in a way that frees them from predatory lenders while bringing clarity to their progress in achieving their goals?

timeframe

3 weeks

industry

Social Impact & FinTech

01 Arguments in favor of Key Design Features

We prototyped a shared digital savings account for multiple members of an Indian rural, low-income family that enables the family to save over time for important milestones like weddings. We wanted to incentivise a family to save digitally over time for such expenses, keeping in mind the ways that different family members play different roles in the savings experience. Research from The Human Project indicated that Rural Indian Families faced the most trouble when it hehe to financial confidence and banking. Rural Indian Families often had only 1 smartphone in the household, often requisitoned through the Indian Government's AndroidOne Programme. The families were also significantly further away from banks and ATMs, and often had to rely on WhatsApp and GooglePay or cash to pay for goods & services around the village.

02 Characteristics of a rural family in india

Rural Families from India were those chosen to design and build digital confidence for. Characteristics of a typical family and its dynamics were plotted to inform future design decisions. Characteristics and the research compiled from The Human Project and Last Mile Money itself suggested that typical families were well versed in using services like WhatsApp Pay through familiarity and practice.

03 Empathy maps & compendium

In order to build empathy and understand who we are designing for, we created personas based on our interviews to capture the different psychographics of real world users. Our target users were rural families, which is a broad demographic.

04 characteristics research

1.14 Billion

People with income of lass than Rs 1 Lakh

+60%

Of Rural Families have volatile cash flows

15%

Of rural families that save less than 10th of their income

23%

of Women lack access to formal financial service

05 Writing Assumptions and Goals

Based on our data, I realised the assumptions I needed for designing to support digital confidence. For example, it might be highly plausible that the household does not speak English and/or cannot operate a smartphone in English. Furthermore, it might also be plausible that the family only owns 1 smartphone in the entire household. With the increased focus on Digital Payments in India, and the government drive to provide low-cost Smartphones, it was still crucial we take these assumptions into account.
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06 User Flow

From the assumptions and goals compiled, it was deemed necessary to create role cards for family members to address family dynamics, and a goals page for them to work together towards a common savings goal. While my team members designed the goal cards, I proceed to craft user flows and onboarding processes for the families. A User flow was compiled for the MVP, detailing which pages the users would interact with and what decisions they could take during the course of the interactions.

07 mvp

At the end of the design sprint, the final MVPs were designed, keeping in mind all the assumptions listed above, as well as all the research conducted throughout the course of the design sprint. It was highly important that the final user flow be interaction-friendly for families that did not speak English and/or were not literate. As a result, I thought it key to include a second version of the Onboarding Process and MVP that was in Hindi. Based on research for collaborating with rural families for financial technology, a unified set of symbols convey numbers and profiles.

appendix

to conclude

The finished designs and User Flows were presented to the IDEO team, who had been working on a similar project in an internal capacity. Throughout the project as Team Lead, I learnt that I am the type of designer who instinctively organizes nebulous ideas and complex information into clear and easy to understand visual models as a way to gather and share my thinking. I am also someone who proactively creates templates for clear process documentation. Turns out these instincts are great traits for leading a team of creative minds.

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