RUBI

Rubi was a start-up based in Harvard that aimed to empower and educate young adults about all things finance. They believed that knowledge is the key to financial independence, and wanted to create an app to provide you with the tools, resources, and insights you need to make confident financial decisions.

TIMELINE: 4 months
ROLE: UX Design, Prototyping, Research

Two phones showing RUBI lesson and course screens

Problem

Gen-Z currently get most of their financial advice from their parents or social media.

Older generations grew up with different financial information, less sophisticated financial options, and often don’t fully understand the options themselves.
Information on social media is often spread without verification and checks for credibility.
Both of these methods of decision making don’t encourage the critical thinking that is needed for personal financial decisions.

Social media posts giving unverified personal finance advice

Discovery

Learning about personal finance is intimidating, overwhelming, and… boring.

Persona: Sara Park, 24, with her goals and frustrations

I interviewed 5 young adults about their experience with learning about personal finance as well as their motivations for it.

Key pain points

Feeling overwhelmed by the vastness of information available online
Not knowing where to start or what is relevant
Missing a hands-on way to learn without putting real money on the line

We interrupt your regularly scheduled program

I had one day to design a flow for a functional MVP.

In order to get into PROD, an MIT/Harvard run accelerator program, RUBI was to show significant progress over the course of one week. This gave me one day to design in order to leave time for development.

I created the flow and the wireframes for a sample lesson to demonstrate how learning in this app could look.

Wireframes for the MVP sample lesson flow

They're admittedly a little bare, but they did the job to get RUBI into PROD. Through this program, I was invited to go to Rome with RUBI for three weeks to continue working on the app 😎

Ideation

Building off the concept design, I wanted to expand on the idea and incorporate more methods of hands-on and interactive learning.

I came up with a fake investing platform where users can practice investing in both stocks and real estate with the in-game currency earned from completing lessons.

Practice portfolio and investing screens

To further mitigate the overwhelming nature of the content and to create a more personalized experience, I also introduced an onboarding/diagnostic quiz to help curate the modules.

Onboarding quiz asking age and where the user wants to start

Iteration

I conducted usability testing with 5 participants, gathering feedback on both the lessons and the stock market flows.

Before and after: moving the lesson call to action

I thought I was supposed to tap this

I didn't see this button….

Moved CTA into hover

Before and after: redesigned portfolio layout

I don't understand what the wallet is.

I didn't know this lead to another page.

Redesigned the layout of the portfolio

Before and after: adding an explanation to wrong answers

It would be nice to see why I was wrong…

Added an explanation

Final design

Learn Personal Finance

Play through curated lessons and earn rubies

Practice What You've Learned

Invest rubies and top the leaderboard

Retrospection

In school, we learn the design process and we may feel that we need to do all of the steps in order. However, the one day "design sprint" really got the ball rolling, forcing me to make decisions quickly. This then opened up time later for usability testing and iteration.

Flexibility is key, especially in start-up life.

Next project

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