Mapping personal finance journeys
Fueling growth strategy by understanding key moments and decisions on individual finance journeys.
This project was conducted under a NDA.
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This page provides an anonymized overview of the project without key details, deliverables or related artifacts.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Why personal finance?
We worked with a fintech company for this project that focuses on enabling autonomy over personal finance and compensation.
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Our client had a clear idea of who its most common users tend to be, but lacked knowledge about how, why and when these individuals make decisions before interacting with their core services.
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To support our client's growth and product teams in better serving their users, our team focused on building a detailed user journey that highlights individual experiences and key decision points.
You make mistakes and then you learn from those mistakes. You [can] learn from someone else’s mistakes but you don’t know the details of their experience. Self learning is the best.
Story from participant
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Goals & Objectives
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Build a detailed personal finance journey map that highlights decision-making and experiences before, during and after interacting with the client's service
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Identify opportunities for our client to enhance the user experience tied to specific moments, mindsets and mental models along the user journey
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Highlight key considerations, bright spots, pain points and barriers users experience
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Determine what tools and resources support users as they navigate their finance decisions
Methodology
Meeting our goals was contingent on strategically recruiting participants and designing a research plan and activities that provided valuable input. I co-lead this project.
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​To build a representative user journey, we recruited a diverse sample of 15 employees.
This sample included:
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A mix of genders and ethnicities
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Individuals spread across major metropolitan areas in the US
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Varying company sizes and industries
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A mix of career tenure and seniority
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A range of total salaries, compensations and net worths
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Different levels of knowledge about personal finance and compensation​
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Most individuals who had taken action about personal finance in some capacity
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Our research activities were divided into two parts, to gather rich data from participants ​​
Part 1: Pre-Interview Homework Activity
We asked participants to share personal finance experiences from different moments in their career. These responses provided media, rich stories and areas to probe on further during our user interviews.
We asked participants to share details about:
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Their first memorable personal finance decision — and related emotions, questions or concerns at the time
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Tools or resources they use to keep track of, learn about or manage personal finance
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Reflections or advice about personal finance they would give to their former self
Part 2: 90 minute in-depth interview
We designed our virtual interviews to help participants recount in step-by-step detail how they have engaged with personal finance through their careers.
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We achieved this through:
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A structured but adaptable interview protocol that followed natural discussion
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Open-ended questions, probing follow-ups
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A co-creation journey activity through Miro
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Post-interview debriefs with the research team, clients and internal stakeholders to discuss emerging themes and future interview questions
Developed an actionable report showcasing a detailed user journey, with clear stages, pain points and opportunities.
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Created a 4x8 foot printable version of the journey map for our client's office space — to inspire conversation among employees.
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Personally led three insights share-out sessions with executive leadership, designers and other project stakeholders.
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Secured a timeline of future projects with our client's design team looking to conduct further testing and product UX research.
