YMCA

A new mobile app teaching life skills to young adults

Roles

Project lead

Research lead

Design lead

Timeline

3 Weeks

Team

Shawn Berg

Julie Fields

Wendolinne Bailon

Problem

Solution

Ymca needs a mobile virtual portal for low-income young adults to access its life-skills program

Young adults mostly have access to smartphones rather than desktops. They need a quick and accessible way to learn about common life skills such as learning about credit, learning how to drive a car, how to get health insurance, etc.

A mobile app with goal tracking portals and mentor and community accessibility

We designed an app that allows users to track, manage, and set new goals to keep their progress organized. We created accessibility to one-on-one mentors to allow users to learn from someone with hands-on experience.

Research

Our demographic is…

Our interviewees could tell you best

  • Young adults age 18 - 29

  • Low-income individuals

  • Based in Los Angeles county, CA

  • Almost 100% of our interviewees wanted to learn about making, managing, and investing money

  • Almost 100% of our interviews also stated that they learn best in a one-on-one environment

Affinity map takeaways

Users share these same sentiments

  • I don’t track my progress much, if at all

  • I could pace myself better to avoid burnout

  • I learn best in a safe environment

This here is Anthony, the voice of our users

The journey he’s been on hasn’t been easy

Anthony shares a similar story with many of our users. His starting point was to learn more about finances and money, but is constantly disappointed by the lack of options available. There isn’t a one stop shop for his problems…yet.

Problem statement

Prioritizing our problem

Anthony needs a tangible way to track progress with financial goals because he wants to make money to become less of a financial burden to his mother.

How might we

Why not have a little fun?

Using a method such as crazy 8’s helped us bring our best ideas forward. Here’s a few examples of those ideas

  • Provide an algorithm to show enjoyable and relevant content to our users

  • Provide a percentage rate of completion on current goals to establish a sense of encouragement and completion

  • Provide calendar for easy mentor booking

  • Provide an instructor “get to know” page to see who is the best fit for our users personality and needs

The big 3

3 needs that we are solving for our users

  • A platform to track financial goals

  • Access to 1 on 1 mentors

  • A supportive like-minded online community

Wireframes

Our design is meant to be easily digestible

Keeping our users needs in mind, we kept a simple UI with simple features such as

  • A pie chart to easily categorize how users money is being divided

  • Visual aid for current goals to instill a sense of tangible progress and achievement

  • A sign up process to help created a feed with most relevant topics to our user

  • Video access to lessons

  • Easy access to mentors and workshops

  • A leaderboard to encourage positive competition and a sense of community

User testing

5 out of 5

All 5 of our users were able to complete these assigned tasks:

  1. Book a 1 on 1 session with a mentor

  2. Onboard on the app and create a new financial goal

Now we know … or don’t

We did succeed by

  • Creating a straightforward process to onboard

  • Making it easy for users to create a goal

  • Making it easy to book a 1 on 1

Learning experience

We could improve by

  • Creating a more in depth calendar

  • Creating a review page for instructors and workshops

In conclusion

What could be improved if time allowed

Testing, testing, and more testing

Our application is a prospective design with many new features that would need to be tested so we can generate the best version of our product. Having better user flows and wireflows would have generated more ideas and made the editing process much easier and saved us time.

Research and refine

Second hand research would have helped us get more familiar with young adults feelings and behaviors towards “self help” topics or apps. Our questions could also have been refined a bit more to help generate more relative information towards helping our design process.

Teamwork makes the dream work

Working in teams isn’t always the easiest, but our open communication made this project enjoyable. I’ll make sure to keep this in mind towards future projects.

The devil is in the details

From this design sprint I’ve learned that research is the most valuable tool to help get all the answers you need. If I’m ever stuck at a point, it probably means I need to do more research. I also see the value in consistently reviewing your research because there are often times more answers in there than you remember. Lastly, I would say to trust the process if you’ve done the research because all the answers are there if you look hard enough.