About the Project
Empowering educators to browse and facilitate financial literacy learning
Web Browser Focused
Team Player
It all began when Intuit reached out to me. Before their ask the answer was emphatically, yes! This was another opportunity for me to work with a recognized brand alongside bright individuals in a small team. The initial pitch went something like this: Intuit is building the Duolingo for learning financial literacy. I was already bought in but having the potential to assist students in improving their personal finance comprehension was a dream. I knew the product we envisioned would be the tools that I wish were accessible to me at a young age.
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Now the 'How'. We asked ourselves, "how do we build a platform where educators can easily browse personal finance curriculum and assign it to their classes?" We spent the next 18 months solving that problem.
Role
User Experience
Architecture
Prototyping
Date
2023 - 2024
01
Talking through real-world scenarios with educators
Gathering Intel
It was impossible to build a solution for educators in a silo, so we had to reach educators who would likely be future consumers of our content and curriculum. We also spoke with students, but teachers were our primary focus as they operated as the administrators of their classrooms. Although we spoke with many educators, what was most profound was discovering that each educator had their own style of teaching, and their own method of providing material to their students – like teacher-led lectures or self-paced work.
My team had developed a deliberate way of preparing for interviews and moderating them. Here's what our process looked like:
Define Goals​
A Google document was created by our Project Manager, in order to list research goals, target audience, and a questions guide.
Finding Volunteers
Volunteers were identified by a team member who managed Intuit's educator Facebook group. Interested candidates would schedule their own time to speak.
Moderate Interviews
During each session one of us would moderate and guide the discussion, while the rest of us would take notes. Most interviews were moderated by myself or our principal designer.
Post Interview
After a series of interviews, we would meet as a team to discuss interested findings, identify common themes, and used key information to help us see opportuities to improve our offering and core functions.
02
Prototyping
Demonstrating Proposed Solutions Through Prototyping
Depending on our goal for our user sessions, I would have a prototype ready for educators to walk through. As they navigated through it we'd observe and capture moments that stood out. At the end of these sessions it was typical for us to ask questions and probe more on the moments that caught our attention. This process resulted in us developing better experience for our teachers and students. My favorite part is when educators would shout "When is this going to be available?!"
Prototype walking through custom course creation, assigning, and viewing student progress