This past week I focused on refining the idea through my contextual review. I also made a few additional research plans to make sure I understand my target audience as well as the technology in the space.
To learn more about my target audience (young adults, particularly college seniors)'s needs regarding financial wellness, here's what I've done (and will be doing).
10/5 - Meeting with StudentLink counselor to learn what financial resources are provided for students
10/10 - Meeting with NYU Career Coach to learn about what students' pain points/needs are and what resources they provide additional to one-on-one meetings
10/17 - Meeting with NYU Wellness Professional to learn more about what students' pain points/needs are and what approach they use to help students
TBD - User Study (I will be working with my thesis advisor to come up with a user study plan to understand my audience better. Initially, I was going to use national financial literacy survey but the survey consists 56 questions which after discussing with my thesis advisor, we both agreed is not a good idea to send out because it's way too long. Instead, I'll work on a user study plan and discuss with him next week before I execute)
With these events, I aim to understand and analyze
existing resources for students
utilization rate of the resources
how well is student's financial literacy
whether financial stress is what students care about
so I can further understand the essential life skill in financial knowledge that people lack and seek to gain as well as validating whether the tool I'm going to create will be useful to them.
Because I'm interested in Natural User Interface(NUI), it is inevitably important for me to learn more about the technology in the space, particularly in AI which is the backbone to create natural voice interaction. Here are the workshops and panels that I am going to
10/5 - IxDA's Conversation in AI
10/10 - Verizon Open Innovation Lab's AI Economy
10/11 - UX + Data's Designing for Intelligent Cognitive Product
10/16 - Humanized User Interface meetup
10/31 - Future Lab's AI Summit
To develop Natural User Interface requires a lot of artificial intelligence to accommodate the natural interactions. That is why I'm going to look into AI to understand how to design for my target audience.
This week I have made a lot of progress, especially after I decided to go towards the NUI direction. For awhile I was exploring different ways to design for financial literacy education and I was especially interested in museum-space design where I would like to take students on a journey to explore key elements of financial knowledge. Due to the limitation of time, I decide to stick with my initial idea of NUI for now.
This coming week, I will be working on prototyping. Here's a use case I came up with
