Assignment 4 - Final Project

Our final project was completed in a group of 4 students. Our decision was to develop a solution that would help young students understand financial responsibility.

From my personal experience, our project had two major cycles. The first cycle was attempting to pursue a credit/discount card solution. This idea revolved around students being encouraged to build credit early - a need that seemed to be lacking within the Singaporean sample students surveyed. This would have taught the importance of building credit as it pertains to financial independence, and also learning how to control spending and avoiding debt. The card offered a bonus of discounts at participating vendors. The feedback on this idea was that it would not be well received by the user population because credit cards have bad connotations associated with them. It also seemed to be too indirect in teaching financial responsibility.

The second cycle was the financial game, which eventually became the final design. This idea evolved through several phases of the design process.

Firstly, we as a group narrowed our identification of the need. From our user research, we concluded that the largest void that needed filling was fundamental knowledge of finance. The next step was to propose an initial product. Since our target users are young, we thought some sort of online game would be the most interesting solution.

The initial proposed design was linked to a major bank. The premise of the idea is to sell the parents instead of their children. As they walk into a bank, the parents see a poster; it tells them about a new program wherein they sign up their sons or daughters for a new bank account, and there is an online game they must pass to receive special rates, offers, and discounts. The game involves different topics, and as the young person completes each game, he or she receives an award. For example, when completing the "Debit Cards" game, they are given more free withdrawals every month, and so on.

Initially, the game involved the students reading a story, and answering challenging questions as they go on. We created a low-fidelity solution for this idea and user card-sorting and other personal forms of evaluation to test it. Feedback told us this game was too direct and stressful; it was too focused on knowledge examination that it became not very fun. Also, this is the phase where we received what I believe to be the more inspirational feedback that propelled us forward. We were so focused on teaching that we took it too far - we created a test-like atmosphere and caused information overload. We were told that learning takes several forms. Even a game like "Monopoly" taught many of us the basics of renting and owning land, but did so without us noticing it. Amidst the fun of the game, one can learn valuable long-term lessons. In retrospect, I cannot agree more with this. Hence, we decided to redesign the game and focus on making it fun, and trust that users will learn as time goes on.

We redesigned this game to create a high fidelity solution. We created a quiz show where each level is a different game (such as Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and so on). Each level, coincidentally, was also a different topic. The users would be part of a network with their friends - those whose parents signed them up as well. Within this network, they could compete and interact with one another. Our goal was to have them learn information "in the back of their minds" by playing the games, but to really ensure they are having fun.

Using MS Access, we created a working solution of the "Jeopardy" game, and presented it. Our user feedback was generally good. The main area for improvement was to make the game more visually pleasing. Of course, creating the game in Access, we knew this going in. There were also a few minor functionality issues such as pop-up windows to define words and concepts, and so on. So the task became creating a final product - essentially a web site - that has all the aspects and features of the real-life final product.

We built a web-site that incorporated all the changes suggested, and did our best (with our humble art skills!) to create a "cool" aesthetic experience. We did final testing on this product to evaluate our prototype again. The constant testing and feedback proved very useful, as we saw a great jump in user evaluation. Many users actually seemed excited to play, and could really see themselves enjoying the series of games that we would create if we launched this program. In hindsight, the project was a solid success.