In my Certificate program, I spent five months creating an interactive educational tool similar to DuoLingo to help users learn about financial literacy. I named it FinBuddy.

I was able to gain a lot of invaluable information regarding UX and the different avenues I could take.

In the first course, we grouped up, found our problem, and started to brainstorm and work on solutions.

To help with conducting research, we hosted 12 user interviews that helped us understand what issues people faced when dealing with financial literacy.

After the user interviews, we came up with two different archetypes to aid us in creating our solution to the financial literacy crisis: The Reckless Spender and The Frugal Budgeter.

In the second course, now separated into individual projects, we learned how to create site maps and user flows. Both of these procedures helped us gain insight into how to better understand and optimize the information architecture of our product.

Once I understood my product’s user flow, I could create a low-fidelity prototype that would help aid my future design language.

The last course delved into the design process. We created mood boards to gather all of our inspirations into one place.

Once all the colors, typography, layout, and icons were chosen and created, I could make the final prototype. FinBuddy was a great learning experience, but I wished I had done things differently. The art style felt limited, and the color palette needed help to be more accessible. Even though there were hiccups with FinBuddy, I am still proud of what I accomplished on my first go-around. If you’d like to try Finbuddy, here is the Figma Link.