Financial Planning

Key Competencies

Collaborative Research

Stakeholder Management

Journey Mapping

Overview

  • Collaborated with Senior Researcher to create research plan and deliverables

  • Incorporated UX Designers and other stakeholders into the research process

  • Created a reference journey map for the free financial content website Fool.com and for potential product development

Background

In the summer of 2021, The Motley Fool was considered developing a financial planning product called Fool Plan. The vision for this product was to enable people to identify and improve areas in their financial journey that might act as a barrier to investing in the stock market. During this time, I was a contractor for The Motley Fool who was brought in to help create a financial planning journey map. The senior researcher had already recruited participants and written the script, so I joined this project at the analysis phase, and contributed my data analysis skills and thoughts about how to communicate results to stakeholders.

Methodology

Using a Jobs to be Done Framework, the senior UX Researcher and I analyzed the data - 15 asynchronous user interviews - using a thematic approach. We used the software Mural to annotate the user interviews on “sticky notes” and then grouped the notes by the phase of their financial planning journey they were on:

  • Prethought

  • Considering Options

  • Gathering Information

  • Making a Plan

  • Evaluating the Plan

  • After the Plan

As we collaborated on this project, we decided that bringing in stakeholders to help crunch the data would create a sense of ownership that would benefit the product design process. We held a session where we educated 2 UX Designers about our approach, and had them identify and capture frequency counts for the themes present in the data. At the conclusion of this session, we created a detailed journey map that captures the complexity of the decision to create a financial plan. Although the Fool Plan project was eventually deprioritized, the Financial Planning Journey Map is still used at The Motley Fool to provide inspiration and serve as a guide for creating user-friendly content and product design for prospective and novice members.