Mindful Barclays
A mobile application extension to Barclays' digital product offerings that changes how students with anxiety face debt management.
D&AD New Blood Awards
Role
User Research, Wireframing, Visual Design, UX/UI Design, Project Manager
Value Proposition
Providing a unique opportunity for Barclays to prioritize their clients’ financial and mental wellbeing, driving client growth and client retention through an empathetic and supportive business strategy
Team
Polina Chzhan, Cassey Peng
Timeline
January 2020 - June 2020 (5 months)
Tools
Illustrator, Figma, Principle, Premiere, After Effects
Problem Context
This mobile application concept is part of an academic project in a senior user experience course and we decided to go further with it to submit to the D&AD New Blood Awards, a renowned international design and advertising competition based in the United Kingdom. The design brief was provided by Barclays, one of the largest British investment banks and financial services companies, that is looking for provocative design concepts that challenge the complicated domain that intertwines mental health and money management.
Initial Problem Framing
How can Barclays help vulnerable customers with mental health issues manage their money better?
“Mental health issues affect 1 in 4 people. And money and mental health are often intricately linked. One problem can feed off the other, creating a vicious cycle of growing financial problems and worsening mental health that is hard to escape. Across England, more than 1.5 million people are experiencing both debt and mental health problems.”
-Barclays UK, 2020
Problem Reframe
For those students vulnerable with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) who constantly suffer from uncontrollable worry, debts are another mental burden for them, dropping them into a negative cycle of debt and worsening mental health.
After conducting deeper research into understanding the linkages between mental health and financial health, we found two main leading points that helped us form a core project direction. First, we found that 55% of university students in England accumulate debt as early as the age of 18 and anxiety is the most prevalent psychiatric problem in college stemming from target-driven cultures across post-secondary institutions.
Insights
Based on the problem context, our team interviewed 3 university students who struggled with minor anxiety to better empathize with their perspectives and everyday lives. This led to two key insights.
Lack of Financial Fundamental Knowledge - How might we help students with anxiety manage their money better by tackling the root cause from the lack of financial literacy at a young age?
Common Negative Mindset about Debt - How might we shift the assumptions of a student with anxiety so they can start thinking in a positive and forward-thinking manner when it comes to the stressful topic of money?
Our team created a persona to better empathize with an individual’s everyday struggle with anxiety and financial stress.
Idea
“We also intend to bring innovation from the Fintech community around the world. We aspire to be one of the world’s most respected and well-regarded banks […] [continuing] to listen to our customers to make the Barclays app the best money management experience in the UK.”
-Barclays PLC Strategic Report, 2018
By carefully considering Barclays’ long-term business strategy, Mindful Barclays is a financial wellbeing application that helps students with GAD develop knowledge and confidence when approaching debts by learning financial literacy through digestible information and understanding their thoughts and feelings through mindful activities.
Wireframes
Internal Flow for the Design Team
Once the product design concept was finalized, greyscale wireframes were created to understand the interaction flow between the screens and acted as an internal design document to ensure any questions were clarified during the design process before time was spent creating the visual design of the mockups.
Art Direction and Visual Design
Keeping Mental Health at the Forefront
To follow suit with existing patterns seen across mental health applications on the market, abstract humans were used as imagery to help those with anxiety bridge a more personal connection to the visuals and warm/cool pastel gradients formed the branding identity. We decided to use Gotham Rounded Medium for headers and Gotham Rounded Book for body copy as this typeface exuded a more casual and relaxed feeling.
Feature Decisions and High-Fidelity Mockups
Changing How They Think: I Believe I Can Do It
University students with GAD have pre-existing assumptions about money. Our solution encourages them to destroy their beliefs through an assumption activity so they can think about debt with confidence.
Changing How They Learn: I Know How To Do It
Students with GAD easily get tunnel vision and feel embarrassed to ask for help. Our solution proactively pushes the information to the user with interactive financial activities while keeping it easy to understand. The information was chunked into digestible card-based sections in order to not overwhelm the user at once. We also utilized a clear call-to-action button to redirect the user to the specific Barclays resource so users are encouraged to apply the knowledge they have learned to their respective Barclays accounts.
Changing How They Feel: I Feel Less Stressed
As university students are faced with many everyday pressures, our solution does not add more stress-inducing triggers to students’ everyday lives by integrating scheduled meditation breaks during and after various financial topics as students with anxiety often can only pay attention for up to 30 minutes. We also decided to use an evening background to represent the time of day that students may finish the particular journeys and to ease the mind before going to sleep.
Challenges
It was difficult trying to constantly differentiate our solution against existing financial health applications and to consider Barclays’ mission to have a digitized innovative strategy. While other financial applications in the market focused on helping users make more money, we took a different approach by balancing both financial and mental wellbeing. With Barclays having access to their clients’ financial data and the ability to leverage it, we saw an opportunity to target this solution at students with detected risky financial behaviours. We wanted to thank our professor, Andrew Hawryshkewich, Stanley Lai from Domain7, and Haoyu Chen from Barclays for their feedback on our work to ultimately help us prepare for the competition.
Reflection
Looking back, our team had to scrap our initial ideas multiple times in order to ensure that we were letting our research guide us naturally into the solution while not getting attached to our initial design concepts. This made me realize how important it is to make sure that a solution and its features are grounded in research and rationale or it would not be a strong user-centered product that could maximize real-world impact.