Final project: Designing for user experience

Need

The group was given the task of identifying a need. After brainstorming several needs, the need to teach financial responsibility at a young age was agreed upon. The solution that will be designed to solve this need will be created from the perspective of a commercial bank. The target customer is youth since it is best to teach financial responsibility at a young age, before detrimental problems arise.

User Research

The group developed user profiles and conducted user research. The novice user for this product is someone with very little banking experience and simply wants to gain competency. The advanced user is a young person with some financial experience and is interested in understanding all the services offered by the bank. The anti-user is the young person who understands banking services and needs more from the product. In this case, a more advanced product is required.

The user research led to a number of user requirements that a solution tackling this need must employ. The user requirements are listed below:

• able to effectively teach variety of financial knowledge to youth
• easily accessible
• easy to use
• not intrusive
• able to fit easily into the user’s day-to-day life
• targeted towards the identified user age group
• teach content relevant to user group
• able to measure progress and success
• able to provide long-term results
• give incentives for use
• interactive
• affordable or even free
• easy to manage and update content
• supports growth of users (i.e. able to provide material for various levels)

Proposed Solution

The group decided on using a series of online game based on financial knowledge. This was seen as a fun interactive to teach financial terms an different banking services. The group conducted more user research when performing information organisation decisions. In this case, the games must be categorized logically. The games all have a different theme varying from Jeopardy to Wheel of Fortune.

High Fidelity Solution

The group decided to create the Jeopardy game as a proof of concept. The key functionalities of the Jeopardy game that will help increase the positive experience of the game is as follows:

• The game will involve a wager system that affects the score
• The online game will have a multi-player option
• The different games will be locked and only become accessibly when the previous game is completed
• There will be an interactive-chat function on the website
• For extended learning, students can click the “learn more” link and more information on the specific topic will be shown

The group built the high fidelity solution in MS Access. Problems arose since the solution is to be implemented using a website and thus the prototype had a jump from a website to MS Access in which the user experience was negative. It was decided that the proof of concept must be redone and created online using a web language.

User Evaluation

Overall the feedback in response to the changes was very positive. Users felt it was worth the extra work and development in order to demonstrate the idea. The overall look and feel of the project was improved.