Research & Product Design

Golden Snacks

Dog finder

I've been fortunate enough to work with Golden Snacks—a fintech startup in San Francisco on a mission to empower people's holistic financial wellbeing. I worked on user research, product design and visual design. This is the first project I did with Golden Snacks—a service helping people to get a better understanding if they are financially in a good place.

About the project

    Problem
  • Users don't care about their holistic financial wellbeing.
    Insights
  • What triggers users to care are special occasions, e.g marriage.
    Solution
  • Motivate users to care by helping them reach their dream.

Key features

  • Goal

    Testing showed that setting a goal was the most exciting part of the user flow, as well as what triggered users to care about their financial wellbeing. Setting a goal personalizes the experience and makes it more meaningful for the user.
  • Questions

    When signing up, users are asked a few questions about their finances in order for Golden Snacks to create a tailored solution for each user.
  • Report card

    After completing the questions, the users are given a report card that indicates if you're in a good financial standing or need to improve something. By signing up, users will unlock the service and be able to access the product and get their finances in good standing.
PRODUCT GOAL

Understand who the main persona is and design a landing page that aims to get users to sign up to the platform.

User Research

  • Did in qualitative user interviews with students and young professionals.. I wanted to understand their knowledge about how to manage their finances and what triggers them to care about holistic financial wellbeing.

I am getting married soon and
that triggers me to think about finance.

Investing is a huge blank hole for me.

I am confused about my retirement plan.

Framing the problem

    Lack of motivation
  • Users are not motivated to care about holistic financial wellbeing.
    Lack of knowledge
  • Users are unsure on how to manage their finances.
    Confused
  • Users find it confusing to manage their finances.

Personas

  • From the user interviews, we could identify two main personas.
  • Emma, 34
    Emma is an engineer who is about to get married. She feels that she is in a good financial place, but she lacks knowledge of how to use her money wisely in a long-term perspective, retirement. Saving money for her wedding triggers Emma to think about her financial wellbeing.
  • George, 23
    George is a student who is facing mostly short-term financial problems, such as month-to-month expenses. Due to that he does not currently have any desire to think about long-term financial wellbeing, we decided to put his persona on the side for now and focus on Emma as our main persona.

Exploring ideas & concepts

After the interviews and framing the problem, we went back to our client with the insight and did a sketching exercise together with the two founders. It was a valuable session—not only for the design process, however, we became closer as a team. I strongly believe that the more people you can bring into the design process who are not designers—the better the outcome.

Low-fidelity wireframes

Based on the exploration of ideas & concept, I was able to design a first version of the landing page in low-fidelity.

User testing insights

    Setting a goal
  • Setting a goal was the most exciting part of the journey.
    Privacy
  • Users felt concerned about the privacy of sharing bank information.
    Report card
  • Confusion around what's the value of the report card.

I don't feel comfortable sharing my
bank information with an online service

Why do I want to email this to myself?

Iteration—user journey

Users did not feel excited about filling out information, but did feel excited about setting a goal. Based on this feedback, I could change the user flow and put the goal in the beginning of the journey. This also helped users to understand the purpose of filling out information.

Iteration—privacy

Iteration—report card

The solution

    Inspired
  • Being able to set a goal in the onboarding motivates the users.
    Educated
  • Users learn if they are financially in a good place.
    Empowered
  • Users learn how to take action and change their behavior.

Final UI

Responsive

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