MicroMe x ShopBack
Project Role : User Research, UI Design, Prototyping
CONTEXT
As part of the industry outreach programme between Lasalle and DBS, together with my teammates, Rachel and Shao Wen. we were given a project to rethink and reframe financial concepts such as Savings, Investments, and Charity on a micro-scale and propose solutions to make personal finance management more attractive and actionable.
CHALLENGE
We had to develop an outcome that covers at least one of the following three objectives:
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Educate users on improving their personal finance allocation in small steps over time.
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Enable users to commit to a sustainable goal of regularly saving, investing, and/or giving back.
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Inspire users to recommend peers to do the same based on the benefits that they enjoyed.
We also had to consider strategies to market the outcome.
EXECUTION
We created MicroMe, which is an integrated feature on the Shopback mobile application, that allows the user to channel their cashback into dedicated micro-savings and micro-investment plans, which will grow their wealth and help to achieve their short-term goals.
User Research
Our starting point was to first define our target audience which were women between ages of 20-39. Through the OCBC Financial Wellness Index 2020 Report, we discovered that Singaporean women were "less confident" in investing than men, which became the main problem that we wanted to address and design for.
To be sure if this is a problem that is worth pursuing, we conducted secondary research from a variety of reports, articles and surveys to uncover the core concerns for women when it comes to financial concepts such as investing.
We conducted a survey where we gathered responses from 35 respondents questioning their reasons for why they are not investing, why they would save and invest their money for, and how inclined are they using micro-savings and micro-investment services.
The responses show that almost 3 in 4 are not investing with the top reasons being that they feel intimidated by the process and find it hard to start due to their lack of knowledge.
To validate our findings and gain a better understanding of the subject so that we can deliver a product that adds value to our target audience, we approached a subject matter expert, Dawn Cher aka SGBudgetBabe who provided great insights to how we can convince a first-time investor to start investing and possible directions we could implement in our product.
Before starting on the ideation, we conducted a competitor analysis of Mobile Banking and Micro-Investing applications to better understand the existing solutions and identify their strengths and weaknesses so that we can develop a strategy that fills the gap.
UI Design
Instead of creating a product from scratch, we decided to leverage from an existing one in the market and introducing additional features to the application which in this case would be ShopBack.
Shopback enables users to earn cashback for their online spending when completing purchases via their website or mobile app. Users who have accumulated more than $10 of cashback are eligible to withdraw it directly to their bank account. On top of the cashback, users are provided with promo codes and discounts to use together with their purchases.
Investing can be quite a scary process for someone new and coupled with the risks of using their own hard-earned money, it will only create additional unneeded stress which will eventually result in them dropping off from continuing. Using cashback removes the perceived risk and enabled them a less intimidating way to get started on their investment journey,
Our solution, MicroMe, introduces 2 new features, MicroMe Save and MicroMe Invest, that Shopback users can use to better leverage their cashback. Instead of directly depositing into their bank accounts, they have access to micro-savings plans that they can manually save or automate the process via weekly deposits which provided them with an attractive interest rate, or they can invest the money with our partnering robo-advisor, Stashaway, will help to assess the investor's risk appetite and help them to auto-invest accordingly.
To get a better grasp of the screens needed to be designed, we mapped out the user flow to display the path a user will take when using MicroMe within ShopBack.
Styleframes
MicroMe Entry Point
MicroMe Onboarding
MicroMe Homepage
MicroMe Save
MicroMe Invest Onboarding
MicroMe Invest
As MicroMe would be a new feature in the ShopBack ecosystem and in the event that this would be pitched to ShopBack, we needed to show in what way would this feature be viable to ShopBack in the long term and also the key challenges that potential users may encounter down the line.
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