Design research

Service design

Creative facilitation

Guiding a fintech startup in designing a financial service for the LGBT+ community.

Company description
Early-stage fintech startup with the aim to improve the financial services for the LGBTQ+ community in the US.

Role
Lead Service Designer

Project info
8-weeks freelance project
Ongoing coaching in human-centered design


Methods
Interviews
Customer Journey mapping
Value Proposition Design
Validation
Workshop facilitation
Date
2020

Challenge

Be-Money is an early-stage fintech startup with the aim to improve the financial services for the LGBTQ+ community in the US.

When I joined Be Money, they only had a rough idea about what kind of product and service they wanted to offer: an LGBTQ+ lifestyle-oriented spending card or debit card. This was based on a pile of unvalidated assumptions regarding the LGBT+community in the US. The team was in high need of a structured research-driven and human-centered approach in order to formulate a strong and unique value proposition.

As Lead Service Designer, I was responsible for designing an LGBT+ tailored financial service proposition, and guiding the team through this human-centered design process. I worked closely with Chief of Product in defining the work-to-be-done and leading the team.

Approach

Explorative research
After reviewing previous work done by the Be Money team and additional desk research, I defined relevant research questions and created an interview guide. With the help of another ethnographic researcher, we conducted 17 in-depth interviews with various LGBTQ+ community members. We made transcripts of the interviews using otter.ai and we documented our insights in Miro.

Side note: I truly love to conduct user interviews. When coaching Be Money team members in conducting explorative user research after my work was done, I shared amongst others the following interview principles that I believe are important.

Always stay open-minded: it's always good to have initial hypotheses when starting qualitative research. However, a common pitfall when having multiple assumptions upfront is that you are not completely open-minded while conducting the interviews. Set the assumptions aside, ask open questions and start listening to what (else) is mentioned during the interviews!

Try to quickly build trust during the interview: don't see an interview as a formal exchange of information. Put your people skills into action and do a genuine try to become friends. For example, make the conversation light-hearted with a little joke or by sharing a personal story. In this way, you will be able to make your conversation partner at ease and learn more from their personal experiences.

Don't script your interview too much: please make sure you keep the interview conversational. I always use my 'interview' guide more as a 'topic' guide to make sure I have covered all the topics I want to learn about.

Treat your interviewees as partners in the research: they shouldn't be the subject of your research. They are the biggest experts you will meet so treat them like this. I love to end my interviews with very open-ended questions: "Anything else I need to know regarding this subject?" "So we are building this service in the following month, what final advice would you give me?"
Research findings
After conducting the interviews, I analyzed all the user insights and presented our first findings during an online workshop with the design team. During the workshop, I shared my insights using the following frameworks and gathered feedback from the team for final iterations.
  • Reframed purpose of Be Money
  • Target group
  • Current customer journey
  • Jobs-to-be-done
  • Interaction principles
Ideation
Based on the initial insights presented, I hosted a remote ideation session with the design team using Miro. The agenda of the brainstorm workshop: 
  • Introduction (goal session, brainstorm ground rules, Miro tips and recap user research)
  • Initial brain-dump
  • Jobs-to-be-done brainstorm (guided using examples and trigger questions)
  • Break
  • Idea clustering and selection
  • Closure
Validation
To prioritize the defined jobs-to-be-done and products features, we hired a quantitative user research firm and collaboratively set up a survey. In the survey, users were able to rank products and services - outcomes of our ideation session. Eventually, 726 LGBTQ+ community members filled in the survey. The survey validated our assumptions and steered us further in defining our core value proposition and service blueprint.

Design outcome

Based on the outcomes of the user research and ideation sessions, combined with the quantitative validation, I mapped out the future Customer Journey of Be Money. This Customer Journey map functioned as a starting point for Be Money's product designer to further design, prototype and validate Be Money's financial app and service.

Result

My research-driven and human-centered design approach helped the team to set aside their assumptions and to truly listen to what their customer needs. Because of my work, Be Money pivoted their business from an LGBTQ+ lifestyle-oriented spending card to a financial service focused on helping the LGBTQ+ community to grow their money.

After my work was done, I coached the team in the next steps - continuing with product validation through prototyping and qualitative research. The Future Customer Journey Map was leading in product development. The user research was also the foundation for further brand development.


Myrthe was instrumental in helping our company to deliver ethnographic research and to distil the findings down into a service design that helped us to identify the core needs of our future customers. Thanks to Myrthe, whose endless enthusiasm, positivity and energy inspires the team, we were able to define our product roadmap and justify our funding round.

Rob Curtis - Founder and CEO - Be Money

Personal learnings

Even 'quick-and-dirty' design research is better than nothing.
The time pressure was high, and the budgets were relatively low. Still we pushed for a design research phase of two weeks instead of jumping into design a development directly. Payed off well.
From before to after, front-end to back-end.
To design a strong service proposition, every touchpoint should be deliberately designed in line with the overall concept. From product offering to how the product is packed and shipped.
Interactives in-store should be flawless integrated into the shopping journey.
To be frank, digital interactives in-store are often still on the thin line of creating true user value for the store visitor versus being there only as a nice gimmick showing of the brand's digital capabilities. I do believe that digital interactives are more valued if they are flawless integrated with services provided by the store employees.