FUTURE PLANNER
Personalized Assessment and Timeline to help young adults gather housing information in a more effective, frictionless way
SKILLS
UX Research
Contextual Studies
Interaction Design
Prototyping
ROLE
UX Researcher
Design Lead
TEAM
Leila Huang
Katherine Liu
Jaclyn Yang
DATE
Jan 2021 - May 2021
Ask yourself as a college graduate to imagine you’re going to buy a house in the future. Do you understand finances, mortgages, rates and credit scores? Young adults are intimidated by the overwhelming information prior to buying a home.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
Blend is a cloud-based software platform solutions for financial services firms.
Though their research efforts typically revolve around current/prospective homebuyers, they are curious to understand even earlier on the mindset and motivations of individuals who anticipate buying a home later in the future but have yet to explore what the process will entail.
UNCOVERING THE PROBLEM
I lead the field study on our clients and stakeholders. As a team, we conducted a variety of research methods that help us generate insight into a young adult’s perception of home-buying, their pain points, and misconceptions.
How might we provide proactive guidance or feedback along the way to better direct their financial trajectory, or alert them as to their readiness to begin the homebuying process?
RESEARCH TIMELINE
Semi-Structured Interview
Affinity Diagramming
Contextual Inquiry [Artifact Analysis]
Speed Dating
Experience Prototyping
Our Solution is a digital platform that generates a unique timeline tailored to users’ needs from a personalized assessment they take.
Users input their basic information, financial status, and any potential home-buying plans. This produces a personalized timeline with a step-by-step guide of when they should do certain tasks.
Information is broken down into digestible pieces, provided along with external references.
“I would ideally like a tool that helps me in the next steps...or just like outlines the whole mind process for me, so it's not ambiguous, and I would feel more confident."
The app's built-in note-taking feature allows users to create sticky notes for useful information.
We want to reduce the barrier of information organization by drawing a parallel between note-taking in real world and digital space.
With a personalized, step-by-step timeline, young adults will find the home-buying buying process to be less overwhelming, more direct, and more approachable.
PROCESS & IDEATION
The Need
The Experience
The Value
People need to keep their information organized to avoid being overwhelmed
Young Adults need personalized advice and information at any point in the process. They want a customizable, convenient tool
The application generate value by attracting a new generation of customers
As a part of the domain research, I recruited participants to complete designated tasks on selected home-buying websites to pinpoint the gaps of information.
The result is analyzed and summarized into usability testing findings.
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
We generated storyboards for exploratory concepts, then interviewed participants to validate user needs.
To gather insights experience prototyping, I asked each participant to share their screen on Zoom and went through the clickable prototype.
PROTOTYPE TESTING
the main focus of our research goal is “whether our idea can address the assigned user needs”, so we choose mid-fidelity prototype and focus more on the functions and features that can help us validate our idea.
The best way to do that is to create buttons and links on Figma that can allow the user to interact with our proposed features to make it look like we have implemented functionality when it does not truly exist.
What I've Learned
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Setting up virtual meeting spaces to facilitate collaborative idea generation, discussion and synthesis for a remote team
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Exercised user centered research techniques
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Define opportunities to insert a value creating service for which tests can be quickly deployeD