Conceptual Financial Literacy Courses for Kids

Do you remember the first time you learned about financial literacy as a child? Not many people do, and neither do I! Building Early Money Habits was designed to fulfill its own namesake: to encourage kids to learn the ins and outs of money through online courses.

Overview

The Problem

There are numerous reasons to teach children about financial responsibility. According to the Brookings Institution, the lack of knowledge in this area has turned into a national concern. Low levels of financial maturity can result in negative credit behaviors, higher loan rates, and even home foreclosure. Unfortunately, many parents don’t feel readily equipped with the knowledge to teach their children themselves and there isn’t really any standardized curriculum found in US primary education.

The Project

This design was part of my capstone project to complete Flatiron School’s product design course. The project consisted of 2 sprints (1 week per sprint). I focused on the UX research and design for this website. The final deliverable was a responsive medium-fidelity prototype of the product’s e-commerce screens where parents would sign up their children for financial literacy courses.

My Role

With the guidance of my instructor, I was the UX Designer on this project. I focused on learning about the current market, the potential users, feature prioritization, and wireframes.

Connecting the Dots

Empathy Mapping

I interviewed 5 parents to gain further insights on their familiarity and confidence in financial literacy education. Criteria for each parent was simple:

The parent must be based in the US.
The parent must have at least one child who is 10-12 years old. (This is when school curriculums touch on markets and basic money systems. Children at these ages also tend to have higher concentration and understanding of external events).
The parent may have allowances or inheritances in mind for their children.

I determined the main user as the parent instead of the child because ultimately, it would be the parent paying for the online courses. At the same time, parents have already established an idea of financial literacy education from what they’ve learned on their own. Therefore, the main pain point of the user was the struggle between parent and child communication. Short attention spans and adult jargon often got in the way of teaching complicated topics at home, and some parents felt that finances, in particular, can be the most difficult to explain.

Competitive Analysis

I looked into 5 existing products that offered similar financial literacy education through online workshops or courses. The majority of these products did not have a focus age group in mind which is why, for this project, the range of 10-12 was established based on childhood development. One of the main issues in the current market is that most products come from banks and are often tied to marketing their checking, savings, and family accounts. It’s hard to come by pure educational intent, and Building Early Money Habits would not include any transactional features, such as wiring money. The sole purpose of this product is to educate.

Curating Ideas

Feature Prioritization

Features can become redundant when disorganized. I used the MoSCoW method (must have, should have, could have, and won’t have) to filter out all ideas considered. In the end, the most viable product would have the following:

Parent onboarding (sign up)
Parent portal
Resources for parents
Educational games and scoreboards
Course reviews
Free live demos

For this project, the final deliverable focused on parent onboarding, particularly when purchasing a course and scheduling a class for their child.

Task Scenario

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the user. To test usability of the website, I formulated this task scenario for participants to interact with the medium-fidelity prototype:

Yesterday your child comes to you and your partner asking for an increase in their weekly allowance. Your child claims that it’s due to “inflation,” a word they heard at school. Your child already received a raise in allowance last month, so you and your partner agree that they need to learn more about how money works, and what “inflation” actually is. A friend recommends to you Building Early Money Habits to start.

Your task is to enroll your child in the first course.

Tests & Results

Metrics

One of the goals of usability testing was to ensure that new users would have a seamless experience paying for and scheduling an online course. With this in mind, I determined that the task flow would only take 8 clicks in 60 seconds. Because I wanted participants to think aloud while completing the task, I added room for leniency: 11 clicks in 90 seconds. Another measurement for success was ensuring that each participant did not encounter more than 3 critical errors. For this product, a critical error would mean more than half as many clicks and seconds outside of what is expected.

Usability Test Report

Due to last minute scheduling conflicts, I was only able to conduct 2 usability tests. Both users stayed within metrics, but offered the following insights for improvement:

Consider changing call-to-action (CTA) buttons to eliminate redundancy. In the task, the user can either “Sign Up” or “Register” from the landing page. “Register” in the hero section may be modified.
Consider adding more information onto one screen rather than having too many pages. This was brought up during the payment process.

Furthermore, from observation, I recommended to consider expanding pricing tiers for the product and adding pops of color and animations in the high-fidelity prototype. For future tests, the courses should be observed with kids involved to study their engagement, and to test marketing content as I used generic body copy for the purpose of the prototype.

Key Takeaways

Financial literacy is one of those skills that is easier said than done. However, and with most skills, there comes a brief opportunity to take advantage of and expand learning by starting as early as possible. “As possible” meaning with the right choice of communication and age-appropriate resources.

Should a high-fidelity prototype be designed in the future, the main focus should follow the current goal to gain new users. Once users are gained, how can we ensure that children transform their lessons into habits?

Building Early Money Habits