Executive Summary

Chime’s Mission Statement

“Everyone deserves financial peace of mind.”

Business Goals

• To research unmet financial needs and develop a new opportunity space for Chime.

• To support college students and/or recent graduates with student loan debt, which, in turn, helps maintain positive and sustainable financial health.

Methodology

Moving from the abstract to the concrete, a dozen divergent & convergent activities contributed to project success by capturing surprisingly voluminous data. The most noteworthy were:

• 2 market competition assessments: To assess the current landscape and mitigate risk by identifying trends, positions, threats, gaps, and opportunities

• 7 cognitive interviews: To enhance memory recall, reconstruct context, provide detailed descriptions, elicit emotions, and detect loaded language

• A charrette: To foster iterative collaboration, generate imaginative ideas, resolve conflicts in time-bound fashion, and test feasibility

• 5 formative & summative concept tests: To test hypotheses, prioritize and refine ideas, assess viability, mitigate risk, and inform development and strategy

Why were these methods successful?

• They narrowed research scope before arriving at viable solutions

• They were didactic (intended to teach something)

• They investigated the interplay of thinking and feeling

• Exploration, ideation, and validation drove design evolution

An essential aspect of this success related to a more universal notion about why we test concepts and designs in the first place: “Every action of the living creature involves some trial and error…[and must become] in some measure a validation or exploration of the proposition “This is the way to do it.”” — Bateson, Mind and Nature, p. 184, 1979.

Discovery Themes

Generative research steadfastly revealed sharply negative emotions surrounding student loan debt. Among many findings, 2 primary themes surfaced:

1. Debt accumulation feels insurmountable and imposes a sizable mental burden on borrowers

2. There is deep resentment surrounding what secondary schools don’t teach: practical economics. (Tax prep was commonly cited alongside the complexities of student loans.) Instead, this education is tacitly outsourced to parents or guardians, many of whom neither fathom nor appreciate the economics themselves, thus surfacing a feedback loop.

Solutions

The 5 concept tests yielded the development of 2 prototyped sets of practical financial tools — guided goal-setting & payment rules — allowing members to consistently set aside customizable amounts of money.

So what? Impact and Business Outcomes

Task flows demonstrably enhanced the value of the existing app by creating a more comprehensive money management system for Chime members, which was the team’s remit.

How? Because participants were socialized to pay attention to what needed to be looked at. With knowledge embedded inside of an interaction, they learned how to see.

Chime enthusiastically embraced final deliverables, signaling it would assess the integration of discovery theme #1 and the two prototyped solutions into its product roadmap.

Recommendations, Next Steps

• Test where loan management would reside in current app ecosystem

• Identify other opaque loan processes in need of special guidance/support

• Identify optimal mobile data visualizations to support comprehension of loan progress and goal creation

• Success metrics:

  • SUS of 2 main flows: payment rules and goal-setting

  • Ascertain % of users who create payment rules after completing goal-setting flow (as contrasted with % currently using Chime’s Round Up rule)

Primary Limitation

Given the ever-familiar constraint — time — emphasis was directed toward interventions related to the reduction of mental burdens (theme #1). In so doing, a more education-oriented solution (theme #2, a more systemic problem) was set aside for future-focused research.

Retrospective

• What did I learn?

  • How tricky it is to design at the intersection of behavior and an emotionally charged financial space.

• What could have gone better?

  • Chime requires a SSN to use and, for security purposes, team members were unwilling to use their own to personally gain access to the app. Chime was also unable to provide a test environment, design system, or UI kit. While they did provide generic screenshots and a style guide, we largely flew blind with respect to app behavior and flows, relying instead on what could be pieced together from YouTube videos.

• What would I have done differently?

  • With more time, I would’ve wanted to intentionally design solutions around more established behavior frameworks, e.g., B=MAP or COM-B (paper)

  • I would’ve been more judicious in scoping proposed solutions, to (1) avoid the potential for feature creep, and (2) stay better focused within time limitations.

• What went well? What will I keep doing?

  • Team members and client stakeholders meaningfully contributed to all steps and got along interpersonally. Consequently, despite stumbles, there were no lasting regrets, but rather valuable takeaways to inform future collaborative research efforts.