OVERVIEW
Statistically more than 40% of college students in the U.S. are not equipped with adequate financial literacy knowledge and skills. Although this is an integral skill, many students lack the right financial instrument to be able to supply their toolbox.
At the University of Texas at Dallas, students recognize the presence of available resources but often struggle to locate them. PocketPal was developed to fill this gap and serve as the essential tool students need to access those resources easily.
ROLE
Team Product Researcher
User Research, Interactions, Visual Design, Prototyping
Tools: Figma, Canva, Google Survey
January - May 2023
UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
Existing financial sources are scattered across the internet, in person via counseling, and is overall confusing and non-beginner-friendly making navigation between difficult. Leading to frustration and inefficiency. Above all, these financial resources are littered with hard-to-understand terminology and numbers. Furthermore, the absence of intuitive budgeting options exacerbates these issues, hindering students' ability to plan and manage their finances effectively.
THE MARKET
Although many apps can help with budgeting, loans, and student finances there is a lack of resources for questions and concerns uniquely attributed to UT Dallas. Our first step to problem-solving was to analyze and restructure the gap in the market targeting specifically UT Dallas students and their college financial experience.
CRUNCHING NUMBERS
In order to discover the most effective way to tackle this problem, my team members and I each interviewed 5 students across campus in total compiling a sample size of 20 people. By using a simple Google Form to collect data we found:
Although 65% of UTDallas students felt that they were financially literate, only 35 percent of students expressed that they do budget their finances.
When asked how the 35% that claim to budget throughout the day or the month, expressed some variation of: "I try to be mindful of how much every purchase is and try to not overspend"
Only 10% of those students have a budgeting plan that they actively implement.
STUDENT PERSONA
SOLUTION
From these findings, we decided that students require an app that delivers features that help them:
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Set up a budgeting outline along with a built-in calculator to help the user stay on track
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A student loan calculator that helps students visualize and understand their APR's and interest rates
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And a comprehensive hub where students can find the information regarding finances right without having to scour the internet for different resources
FINAL HI-FIDELITY MOCKUP
As the course was primarily centered around user research under the guidance of a professor, most of my team members were unfamiliar with using Figma thus missing the the opportunity to work together on a low-fidelity mockup. Consequently, I assumed the responsibility of translating I took our team's ideas and concepts into a basic, simple hi-fidelity mockup of what PocketPal intended to look/function like.
