Re21 — Financial Literacy for All

Problem Statement

Financial freedom can be difficult to attain without access to financial education. Providing knowledge and resources can help users improve their financial well-being.

Our goal is to create a platform that makes it easy for users to learn about finance, put their knowledge into practice, and access financial tools and services all in one place.

Project Overview

The project is spearheaded by ThitsaWorks & DSIK as a part of their financial inclusion initiative. The goal is to help financially underserved populations, with financial knowledge and access to financial products.

ThitsaWorks Pte. Ltd. is a Singapore-registered FinTech Company, as a real-time payment and credit intelligence solution provider for financial inclusion.

The German Sparkassenstiftung aims to enhance the professional capacity of its partner institutions, empowering them to offer their customers permanent access to financial services. In particular, small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), but also poor population strata and social fringe groups.

Role & Responsibility

As the lead product designer for this project, I collaborate closely with the product owner to establish the product direction, make product decisions, conduct workshops and create the design system.

What I’ve learned:

• Developing the product narrative and vision to ensure that all stakeholders understand the product’s objectives
• Employ and collaborate with entry-level designers
• Coordinate with various stakeholders from different organizations

Challenges

• ThitsaWorks has a Facebook page called “Pite Pite” to share financial knowledge, but customers cannot apply the financial knowledge they learn to build good habits
• They also work with microfinance providers to generate leads but they don’t have a proper pre-qualification process
• It is hard to successfully bring an app to market, but doing it in the middle of a military coup is challenging with all the electric and internet blackouts

Discover Phase

The main stakeholders for me to manage are ThitsaWorks, DSIK, and the development team. The main point of contact is Zun from ThitsaWorks, who is the linchpin that holds everything together.

The initial brief is pretty vague — build a budget planner application with these features:

• Saving goal
• Budget planner
• Digital financial literacy

To bring everyone on the same page I decided to run a Lightning Decision Jam so that everyone’s voice is heard and we have a common understanding of the product goal.

We also ran multiple workshops during the product design process with different stakeholders to refine the product direction.

Design Process

This is my first time as an independent product designer, helping bring a product from concept to market. I had two streams of the design process to consider: product design and branding. I had help from Kyle, who mentored me in the planning stage.

To make the client understand the design process, the tasks were divided as follows:

Product Design: Defining the Product & Users, Journey Mapping, Wireframe, Key Screen Flows, UI Screens, Design Library

Branding: Brand Strategy, Mood-board, Initial Visual Direction, Logo Design, Brand Guideline, Brand Collaterals

This case study focuses on the Product Design side of the project.

Quantitative & Qualitative Research

For quantitative research, ThitsaWorks’ other product, Pite Pite, has the audience we want to serve and we collected surveys from them.

From that list, we ran in-depth interviews to understand possible use cases:

• We tried to find out what their goals are and the tools they will need to achieve them
• We focused on how they learn financial knowledge and the tools they use to track their day-to-day finances

Competitive Analysis

To get a solid understanding of how our competitors are doing in the market, we conducted a competitor analysis of direct and indirect competitors in both international and local markets.

Definition Phase

We created user personas and journey maps to make our research findings easier to understand for our stakeholders.

Ideation Phase

We defined the actions and features needed and prioritized them according to their importance and usefulness. We also designed the information architecture to align design decisions with user behavior.

Design Phase

These are the design steps we took for our UI design process: paper sketches, low-fidelity wireframes with variations, and high-fidelity design.

Paper Sketches — I hosted sketch sessions with our PM and stakeholders to understand their thinking processes and to build shared ownership of the design process.

Low-fidelity wireframes — From these sketches, I synthesized low-fidelity wireframes. We decided to use the Material Design library to optimize our design for developer hand-offs. After we finalized our wireframes, I started working on branding and visual design, while the developers started laying the app foundation to meet our deadline.

Final Design — After finishing the branding and visual design, I came back with pixel-perfect UIs for the developers. Using the Material Design library creates less friction between designers and developers and reduced the need for custom components.

Expense Tracker flow:

21 Days Challenge:

Mascot design and custom icons:

The Result

Re21 launched in the last week of January 2022. In 6 months:

• 9K users, used in more than 10 countries
• 97% of responders think Re21 is for long-term usage
• We also created Re21 Coach, a companion app for MFIs to assist users applying for microfinance loans

Post Launch

Following the product launch, I remained involved in the project on a retainer basis. I assist the team in organizing product documentation so that our ideas can be easily understood and continued by future team members. I use quantitative and qualitative research, as well as customer feedback, to continuously improve the product’s performance and user experience.

“In addition to his UI/UX and project management skills, Mike is excellent in oral and written communications. Mike not only developed the visual elements, but he has also drafted brand guidelines, reports, and project documentation and conducted presentations for various organizations’ senior representatives. Mike is a reliable and productive team member who can deliver good results efficiently and works well under tight deadlines.” — Nyi Nyein Aye, CEO & Managing Director

Designers who supported me: Aye Pa Pa Myo, Htet Aung Lynn