A financial assistant, Mo, built from a deep study of how millennials actually think about money.
Brief
Using a wealth of ethnographic research, we put together an extensive report into the relationship between people and money, and used the findings to develop a financial assistant: Mo.
Outcome
We designed and prototyped Mo, a financial assistant chatbot that could bring together someone's disparate financial products — made possible under the EU's Open Banking legislation — to give them a clear, single picture of their finances. We presented the research and prototypes to a number of major banks feeling the pressure from challengers like Monzo and Starling; RBS bought exclusive rights to the proposition and asked our team to build it for them, which became Mimo.
My role
On this project I focussed on interaction design, visual design and user research.
Toolkit
- Design —
- Sketch · Flinto · InVision · Photoshop
- Research —
- SurveyMonkey · Dscout · OptimalSort · Skype
01Understanding a misread generation
Millennials are a heavily studied, and still largely misunderstood, group of consumers — their behaviours and attitudes are often misrepresented, which makes them a difficult group for financial providers to retain. As roughly a quarter of the population, they're a valuable group to understand properly.
In-home interviews explored user behaviour through a blend of questions, activities and observation, while a remote diary study gave contextual insight into transactional and spending behaviour — surfacing contradictions between self-perception and reality. We analysed both to put together a set of themes and the tactics underlying them, which shaped where we focused next: building a financial assistant chatbot rather than another banking app.
02Prototypes, and a brand to carry them
I was responsible for the high-fidelity prototypes in Sketch, using Flinto to mock up the micro-interactions, shared with stakeholders and used for further user testing. I also worked on the branding — putting together brand guidelines covering vision, values, visual identity and tone of voice — and as the project progressed, refreshed that into a fuller set of guidelines, mocking up how they'd apply across media including advertising campaigns and physical cards.
Next in archive — Motability