We were tasked with researching, designing and building a digital experience for planning, saving, budgeting and/or giving.

There are currently tools and web sites that allow for ways to aggregate account information and provide a means for tracking, spending, saving towards a goal and giving to charitable organizations.

Our project focuses on exploring how Generation Y manages their money in order to develop an innovative and effective digital solution that builds a deep and trusting relationship with Bank of America's products and services, enabling customers to achieve their financial goals.

We gathered data by using several research methods to explore how people manage their finances. These methods included a Literature Review, Competitive Analysis & Heuristic Evaluation, expert interviews at industry conferences, diary studies and a collective of methods known as Contextual Design.

OVERVIEW
During our kick-off meeting, we worked together with Bank of America to discuss the needs and goals for the project. We created a focus-setting affinity diagram revealing several important foci to guide our research.

DOMAIN KNOWLEDGE
To explore the problem space of budgeting and planning, we conducted an initial literature review by surveying the existing peer-reviewed research and some additional news sources. This review helped us to validate our decision to choose to focus on Generation Y, ages 18-32, and enabled us to get a better understanding of the difficulties individuals face in doing financial management. After we synthesized our user research findings, we revisited the Literature Review to delve deeper into the themes revealed in these findings.

We surveyed the competitive landscape of financial management software and compared them with Bank of America's own solutions. This gave us an idea of where Bank of America stands against its competitors in the personal financial management space. Our analysis focused on both key features offered and the usability of each of the solutions.

USER RESEARCH
Our user research follows the user-centered design process, with additional research methods incorporated to ensure participants' privacy. We conducted a total of 22 Contextual Inquiries and 12 Diary Studies across four target demographics within Generation Y.

THE PARTICIPANTS
We recruited and conducted field research with 22 participants in the Pittsburgh area. We were able to reach out to a wide range of people across different neighborhoods and demographics. We met with these participants in their homes or where they typically perform financial management and planning tasks. Below is a graph showing the Spring research participants divided by age range.

CONTEXTUAL INQUIRIES AND DIARY STUDIES
We performed Contextual Inquiries, a data collection technique used to gather data about the structure of a customer's work practice in the field. Due to privacy concerns for our participants and the personal nature of finances, we were not able to directly observe our users in the process of managing their finances. As a result, we used Diary Studies in conjunction with a visioning activity for 2-visit interviews. This way, we were able to gather detailed, contextual information about users in the process of managing their finances. At the end of the first interview, participants were handed a diary and told to record in the diary whenever they encountered a situation involving money or financial management. In a follow-up interview scheduled a week later, we walked through the participants' diaries, asking them to verbally explain what they did in each diary entry. The 2-visit structure also helped enable participants who were uncomfortable initially speaking about their finances open up.

SYNTHESIS
Together we interpreted the data from our interviews, dairy studies, competitive analysis and literature research. We organized the data into hierarchical levels to expose the major themes. We also took the user data and created personas to help inform our design in the next phase.

INTERPRETATION, CONSOLIDATION AND ANALYSIS
To interpret the data from our user research, our notes and pieces of our transcripts were added to CDTools, a Contextual Design software, and printed onto Post-it notes. We clustered the almost 1,200 individual notes based on content or theme similarity, and built multiple hierarchical levels to encapsulate details across the notes and inform the themes of our research findings. These were used in addition to contextual models to inform our design recommendations moving into the ideating and prototyping stages of our project. In a Diary Study, participants were asked to consistently keep track of events or activities, with the aim of revealing detailed information about a user's habits and process over a period of time. As a result, Diary Studies revealed personal feelings, beliefs, attitudes, and thoughts over a period of time.

PERSONAS
We created 3 personas from our data. A persona is a model of a user; a character that draws from specific information from each of our research participants, but as a whole does not represent any single one of the participants. We used the participant financial behaviors to determine the different personas.

Our Design phase encompassed 2 phases, a concept exploration phase and a design and evaluation phase. During the concept exploration phase we engaged in several data-driven brainstorming and concept validation activities. Balancing the customer goals we uncovered during research, business goals and innovative thinking we iterated through cycles of design and development in the 2nd phase.

OVERVIEW
From our research we developed design goals to enable both the goals of the customer and the business goals. We kept these design goals in mind throughout the concept exploration and design and evaluation phases as we iteratively designed and evaluated our concepts.

PARTICIPANTS
We were able to do continue to adjust our concept and improve our design as a result of the feedback from 53 participants. We had 16 participants during the concept exploration phase. Once we selected a concept direction we evaluated our iterative designs with 37 participants.

CONCEPT VALIDATION
After immersing ourselves in the research data we performed several different brainstorming activities to explore all possible innovative concepts. We used several methods to ideate including individual ideation, collaborative brainstorming exercises, scenario flows, storyboards, Speed Dating (a concept validation technique), paper prototype testing and peer critiques.

BRAINSTORMING IDEAS
We held several brainstorming sessions in order to consider all possible solutions implied through review, analysis and visioning upon our Spring research findings. We brainstormed individually and created affinity diagrams to form our initial 6 concept areas. To expand upon these areas we participated in a collaborative ideation exercise called "Yes, and" where we interactively build upon each other's ideas.

SCENARIO FLOWS AND STORYBOARDS
We expanded upon our original ideas by creating scenario flows to envision how potential users would use the concepts. We then turned these flows into storyboards to use for concept validation with users. We validated these ideas using a technique called Speed Dating. We met with 11 participants for 10-15 minutes, explained the storyboards and had them fill out a brief demographic survey.

DESIGN AND EVALUATION
Once we were able to narrow down to a single concept we began to iterate through paper prototypes followed by interactive web and mobile prototypes to better understand and improve our concept. We gathered feedback from 37 participants in order to make the new concept easier to learn and the interface easier to use.

PAPER PROTOTYPING
We started by building a low-fidelity digital prototypes. These screens lacked color and incorporated minimal visual design. We used a rough, black and white appearance in order to elicit feedback about the overall concept and fundamental structure of our design. We iterated on each other's designs as well as analyzed the feedback we received from participants to create higher and higher fidelity paper protoypes that incorporated additional visual design and content such as color, branding, in-line help and first time use help.

HIGH FIDELITY INTERACTIVE PROTOTYPING
While testing the highest fidelity paper prototype we began to create interactive high fidelity prototypes using HTML, CSS and Javascript. We additionally decided to build a small database so that the participant experience with our prototype was more realistic. We built the interactive mobile interface using fireworks and loaded it on to iPhones to perform the testing.

USABILITY LAB STUDY
We conducted 21 on site research sessions on July 7th and 8th, 2011 at the User Experience Ballantyne Usability Lab in Charlotte, NC. The study followed a think aloud usability test approach, which was one-on-one (a test participant and a facilitator) and lasted approximately 60 minutes. Participants completed the tasks using a high-fidelity interactive web prototype and a click through of the mobile application on an iPhone. The test was broken up into three parts: a website evaluation, a mobile evaluation and overall and concept evaluation. The participants filled out a survey at the end of each of the three sections of the test. For the website and mobile evaluations the participant read the task aloud and attempted to complete it or provide each participant read the task aloud and then attempted to complete the task and/or provide feedback about what they saw. In the final section the participants reviewed the website and mobile application and provided additional conceptual feedback.

We prototyped an interactive mobile and web solution to encourage better financial practices for Generation Y. Our final deliverables included a final presentation, a summary report, the interactive prototypes, a promotional product video, and a video demo.

Due to the nature of our project, we are not able to disclose any details about our research findings or our design. For more information, please contact the team members, Carnegie Mellon HCI masters faculty directly or visit www.bankofamerica.com.

For question about the content, or to learn how to sponsor a project please contact:
Jenna Date
Director of MHCI
jdate@cs.cmu.edu
412 268 5572
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA

Cense is a multidisciplinary team composed of Masters students in the Carnegie Mellon Human-Computer Interaction program. The team member's have a wide range of backgrounds including design, computer science and technology, psychology and computational biology.

SHOSHANA HOLTZBLATT
PROJECT LEAD
Originally from the Boston area, Shoshana received her Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Northeastern University. After graduating, she worked for Iron Mountain as a User Experience Designer to improve their enterprise software products. Subsequently, she joined the consulting firm known for developing Contextual Design, InContext Design. She worked as a Work Practice Designer for a year before coming to Carnegie Mellon to pursue her Masters in Human-Computer Interaction.

SRIRAM RAMASUBRAMANIAN
TECH LEAD
Sriram did his Bachelor's in Computer Science and Engineering and went on to work with a startup company, Starent Networks, developing 3G and GPRS networks for Vodafone properties. After 3 years of working with mobile technology, he decided to switch streams and pursue his passion of designing user interfaces. He is doing his Masters in Human-Computer Interaction to learn about designing for mobile devices.

MOLLY NIX
DESIGN LEAD
Molly grew up outside of Boston and completed her undergraduate degree in Communication Design and Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon. She has had design internships at Google, Yahoo!, and Tank Design, a multi-disciplinary design firm in Boston. She decided to pursue a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction to further her development as an interaction designer.

RAY LIN
INTERACTION DESIGN LEAD
Hailing from Taipei, Taiwan, Ray grew up learning English at an international school. Ray pursued a degree in Computational Biology at Carnegie Mellon and became involved with several research projects at the University. In his Senior year, he decided to switch his focus to Human-Computer Interaction, applying and enrolling to the masters program at CMU.

SANCHIT GUPTA
USER EXPERIENCE LEAD
Sanchit did his bachelors in Information and Communication Technology in India. After developing a number of applications and taking variety of courses in his undergrad, Sanchit realized that he is interested in designing software and applications. To explore his interest in design and technology, Sanchit is currently doing Masters in Human-Computer Interaction.