Young Investors
Leading a design team focused on personalization and simplicity, the Young Investors app successfully engaged over 100,000 college students in its first year through an intuitive interface, tailored education, and gamified features, contributing significantly to the company’s strategy for reaching a younger demographic.
Role
VP of UX Design
Year
2023-2024
Team
10+ designers, content strategists and researchers
The Problem
The company sought to reach a younger audience, primarily individuals between the ages of 18 and 35, to help them engage in more mindful investing.
The challenge was to create an engaging, user-friendly experience that resonated with a tech-savvy, yet financially inexperienced audience. We needed to design a product that would educate users, while also encouraging them to take action and start saving and investing at an early age.
How might we empower young investors to make smarter spending and saving decisions?
Opportunity
Develop a Holistic Financial Wellness Solution
We had an opportunity to create an integrated product combining spending and savings tools with educational modules, behavioral challenges, and emotional support to holistically address young investors' financial goals and literacy.
Establish a Platform for Early Financial Foundation Building
The challenge was to build a specialized platform designed to empower young investors, and help them in establishing strong financial foundations early in their lives.
How might we provide an opportunity to build financial literacy to achieve greater financial security and engage these customers well beyond the college years?
Strategic Approach
Leading a team of designers through a customer-centric approach, focusing on personalization and simplicity. We worked through extensive behavioral and user research to understand the needs, pain points, and behaviors of young investors that the first release needed to build upon. The application featured two accounts, savings and spending, coupled with a growth area which focused on incentivized financial education, in bite sized modules.
The design team collaborated closely with 9 product engineering teams to ensure the application was built with the latest mobile technologies while remaining intuitive and accessible. Through systems thinking workshops, we iterated on future expansion of the offering using gamification techniques like Smart Habits, Challenges and even Emotional Check-ins.
This solution featured a clean, modern interface with personalized recommendations based on user behavior and financial goals. The company piloted the app with University of Kentucky, before expanding to additional universities and the open market, to ensure we were hearing the voice of our customers and our clients.
