EBI - The Future to Financial Awareness
EBI is a service design project that conducted a study on the financial literacy of students in the university. The study aimed to research student spending patterns and educate them on the importance of financial literacy and encourage them to make better financial decisions.
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During this study, we used multiple research tools such as:
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Journey Mapping
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Stakeholder Mapping
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Expectations Map
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Contextual Interviews
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A Day in the Life
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Survey Questionnaire
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This project was a collaboration between
Naqiyah Mustafa, Aqeela Virgee, Elham Ascha & Maya Al Kharaz.
Primary Research
For our research, we decided to do both primary and secondary research. We did our secondary research to gain data about financial literacy among students and if this is a common problem that arises among them. We also did research to understand saving behaviors and financial problems that most college students have globally. Apart from learning more about the lack of financial education we also conducted research to understand the importance and benefits of financial education and how financial literacy can lead to a healthy lifestyle for most college students after leaving university. We conducted our primary research among the students at the American University of Sharjah.
Our purpose behind doing the research was to gain insight into students' spending habits and financial literacy in this cultural context. By conducting our surveys and contextual interviews we were able to get a first-person perspective from the students about how they feel about their finances, if they have any savings, and whether or not they feel financially responsible or not. The research findings would allow us to focus on our audience.
Problem Statement
Our main objective while working on this project is to create a positive financial environment for students to understand the importance of sensible spending and savings. We aim to ensure that students learn these important things about maintaining their finances before they leave university so they are prepared for the future that lies ahead.
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Students are unaware of the problems that can arise when you aren’t careful with managing your finances and our project aims to make sure that we can help these students and provide them access to information that increases their knowledge about finances and makes them more financially aware.
Research Tools
Stakeholder Map
Empathy Map
Journey Map
Service Blueprint
Findings
The analysis of our findings allowed us to create groups that the findings resided in, such as parent dependency, spending patterns, lack of financial knowledge, etc. With the help of these groups, we started to create insights based off of these findings. Our first insight was primarily the cultural mindset of students. We witnessed that students found comfort in being coddled by their parents financially. The problem here is that the parents think it is their responsibility to provide financially for the students even when they are in college and even afterward. Due to the cultural context, the students have been raised to feel that their parents will always support their financial needs no matter how lavish and unnecessary their costs are. Most parents that come to the U.A.E have migrated here for the purpose of jobs and to make money so they always feel that they should provide for their children for whatever they missed out on their own childhood.
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The flip side of the coin is that students also see their parents as a financial safety net. Because of their parents’ paternal instincts and coddling behavior, students think it is okay to always fall back on their parents financially and thus take no responsibility for the way they spend. Many of them do feel conscious about their spending but they feel that no matter what happens, their parents will provide and support them.
The second insight that we analyzed was peer and social pressure. Many students felt the need to spend excessively due to the friend groups that they hung out with or the kind of places they went to. If the entire group of friends was going out for lunch to a fancy restaurant, the student would feel compelled to go in fear of missing out and that would lead to him spending more than he had initially planned to spend for that day. Apart from that, due to social obligations, such as birthdays, graduation, and other celebrations, students are forced to spend on gifts and other outings for those events which again becomes expensive on a student's budget. Most importantly this spending becomes even more difficult when the bill for such outings and gifts is not split evenly and some people are bearing the costs of others. Socializing can ultimately become quite an expensive affair if these things happen on a regular basis.
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Overall there were many valuable insights that occurred from our research.
Solution & Prototype
Our solution is a pop-up experience room that allows students to be thrown into a real life scenario where they are forced to look after their finances and make decisions. They will be given roles, jobs, and other components of a fully planned profile. They will then follow through the room, interacting with our touch-points and experiencing different scenarios where they are faced to make tough choices, such as Which car to buy?, What house to stay in?, Do they need insurance?. And other real life situations that would arise after they leave university.
The solution focuses on having a fun take on the rather dry and serious topic of financial literacy. By creating a fun, dynamic and competitive environment, we are allowing students to not only experience the decisions of real life first hand, but we are also emphasizing the importance of learning about their finances and making independent financial decisions to live a financially positive life after they graduate.
Reflective Case Study
Our project revolved around the theme of “financial literacy,” and consisted of four phases: discover, define, develop, and deliver. Through each of these phases, we faced challenges, accomplished tasks, and gained knowledge.
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In the beginning, during the discovery phase, we had to create a foundational report and a design research plan. From this phase, one of the main things that we learned was how each of us works, what our strengths and weaknesses are, and how we work as a team. For example, we realized that Maya was good at illustrations, Naqiyah at organizing, Elham at putting everything together and creating presentations, and Aqeela at writing. As a team, we were all organized and extra in general, so creating a work plan was easy for us, we even created a calendar and used the Trello smartphone application! One of our challenges was deciding what questions to put in our surveys and interviews. We needed questions that would actually help determine our solution and at the same time, we didn’t want to create questions that would sway our interviewees’ responses. To help combat this issue, we created a rough draft and then printed it and screened it as a group, after which we asked the professor to go through it as well.
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After the discovery phase came the define phase, it was here that we had to create a design brief and conduct our first presentation. Our biggest challenge in this phase was how to interpret our primary research. We had survey responses and interviews, and then we kind of sat around as a group thinking, “Now what?” We did not really understand the difference between needs and insights, and we really did not know how to find them! It was then that the professor suggested we look at it visually using Post-its. No one had any and Naqiyah had the brilliant idea of printing them out in squares and cutting and sticking each paper up, luckily Elham and Aqeela ran to the bookstore to buy some! After writing down all the important quotes from our interviews on Post-its, we categorized them into 6 different groups: parent dependency, lack of financial knowledge (even after graduation), savings and how and why people save, spending patterns, financially unaware but want to be, and “if I worked.” Once we did that we kind of had a better idea of what the commonalities were in our interviews, but once again we were stuck. It took us all of the class that day and almost an hour after class with the professor to finally come up with our insights and key needs!
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The development phase was where we finally had to start thinking of solutions, something the whole class wanted to do from when the project was introduced! It was here that we had to visualize our concept and present it to the class. We had a lot of difficulty coming up with an idea that would help solve the problem, be unique, and attract students’ attention. But, through a class-long brainstorming session, we managed to come up with quite a creative idea that we are all very proud of! This experience helped us to imagine how designers ideate in creative firms, and how through really thinking out of the box and combining various minds’ ideas you can come up with ingenious innovations. It was during this phase that we also learnt the importance of time management as there was a lot that we needed to do for the submission. Although we really stuck to our deadlines and divided all the work, we still managed to finish the night before! But, as a group, we were getting better at being organized and definitely improved for the final submission.
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The final phase was the delivery phase, which consisted of the final design manual and the final presentation. During this phase, the main skill that we had perfected (almost) as a team was time management. Straight after our presentation for the development phase, we divided the work that we had to do for the next submission with deadlines, and everyone actually stuck to those deadlines! The hardest part of this submission for us was creating the video, we really did not know how to shoot such a small prototype. If we shot from above, how would we show the viewers where the person moves? If we shot from the perspective of the players, how would the viewers be able to tell where they were going as all the walls were the same color? It was a huge challenge for us! Also, we needed everyone to shoot the video, so finding a time that worked for everyone was another difficulty.
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Although we had our ups and downs, this project was a great learning experience overall! The best part was that we worked well together as a team and had the same work ethic, which we know is not always the case in the work field. But, in general, we learned quite a few skills that we can apply in the future, from how to use the various canvases correctly to how to analyze interview findings.