finEQUITY.org
Introduction
finEQUITY is an existing non-profit that helps families and individuals affected by incarceration. My team of four UX designers re-examined their strategy and the design excution of their mobile website in order to craft a product that would to better serve their users.
Goals
Re-think the site organization to be more common sense and faster to navigate.
Change the approach of the site to being a user-centered one.
Make the site accessible to the visually impaired.
Make the site more optimized for search engines.
Repair broken links and error pages.
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User research, UX and UI design, information architecture, user testing.
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Zoom, Slack, Google Suite, Figma.
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Elizabeth Anderson, Jade Wang, Kelly Kenneally, & Tatjana Gall
Deliverables + Timeline
1/3 Research and refinement of ideas.
1/3 Low fidelity prototype and testing.
1/3 Hifi prototype and testing.
We had three weeks to ideate and build a high fidelity prototype. The work was roughly dividied into three equal stages:
The Problem
Families and individuals affected by incarceration often don’t have foundational building blocks in place for financial success, such as checking accounts, healthy credit scores, credit cards, and retirement savings.
Without the foundational background, individuals are more prone to recidivism and repeating the cycle rather than breaking it. FinEQUITY aims to reduce these barriers and introduce users to these concepts through correspondence courses, micro-loans and online instruction—however, finEQUITY currently doesn’t have the digital infrastructure to achieve this.
The Solution
We created a responsive mobile design of the site that properly executes their shift in focus to a more user friendly site. We prototyped a cleaner, more streamlined website that draws attention to the services offered.
Research
Part 1: Scholarship and journalism
“Financial literacy for offenders is an extremely important key to offender success. Yet, the reality is that most offenders are not financially prepared for release, even if they feel confident with their money management skills.” (Mielitz & Marcum, 2020).
“...as a recent study of Arkansas inmates found that 27% had never opened a checking account and 56.2% had never opened a credit card.” (Glidden and Brown 2017; Koon 2014).
Amazon Prime Documentary “Home/ Free”
Jess, pictured here, was featured in the documentary. She had been incarcerated multiple times in her youth. When she was released from jail, she began the journey towards financial stability. However, like many former inmates, she had no contact with her family and no previous-information about mainstream jobs. Because she didn’t understand what “PTO” (Paid Time Off) stood for, she ended up being taken advantage of financially during her first job as a house painter. Her story is ultimately a happy one, but many people exiting the prison system, and their families, do not have the information, tools and connections to help them build credit and gain financial independence.
“Educational programming for inmates that focuses on establishing credit, opening accounts, and budgeting should be essential for those who are preparing to exit a facility.”
Part 2: Interviews
Our team was not able to find interview subjects who exactly fit our target demographic, but we did conduct four interviews with people from all walks of life. We relied more heavily on research that painted a picture of what people affected by incarcerated struggle with in terms of prosperity.
3 out of 4 interview subjects did not develop financial literacy before adulthood (was not discussed at home or at school).
Learning styles were all different, from visual learner to preferring alone with books, although 3 out of 4 people say they enjoy in-person instruction.
Via an Affinity Diagraming exercise, we were led to the following conclusion:
User Insight
Through our interviews and survey, we discovered that financial literacy has rarely been taught and most users piece together information on their own. We believe that having access to financial literacy tools and mentorship is essential. By changing the focus of the finEQUITY website towards immediately accessing resources and services, families of incarcerated people and those rehabilitating their finances after incarceration will be able to find assistance faster and more easily.
User Persona
“I’ve heard a lot about re-integrating into society, but I’m not sure how to start”
Name: T.
Age: 20’s
Education: GED
Job: Stocker
T. has recently been released from prison. They entered the system early in life and because of a lack of resources and support they are finding it very difficult to start over. T. doesn’t know where to begin re-building their life, they just know that they don’t want to go back to prison. After constantly being told they would “never amount to anything” they are looking to prove the people who have doubted the, wrong. T. feels anxious but is cautiously optimistic about rebuilding their life.
Goals
Remove obstacles to prosperity.
Gain access to resources or learning opportunities.
Understand the components of finances (savings, credit, etc.).
Find a learning style that works well for financial empowerment.
Frustrations
Learning about finance is difficult and daunting.
Unsure where to look to start learning.
Family and school were not useful resources for complex financial information.
Feels exploited/taken advantage of because lack of knowledge.
Journey Map
Building credit is a slow process – with a certain degree of opacity around the credit score evaluation system. Often, people who are starting their credit building journey may not see results for many months, with unwitting set-backs that take time to repair. Hopefully, with an empowering groundwork of financial education, and special levers available through finEQUITY, users can see opportunities opening for them and their lives improving in the two years after prison.
User Flow
There had been a lot of content on the home page about becoming a donor, a partner, an employee, or a volunteer, but not that strong a call-to-action for people who would be benefiting from the service. We decided to bring the Services flow front-and-center. About Us ended up getting moved to the navigation to compete even less with Services.
After Card Sorting, we came up with a Site Map.
Wireframing + Mid-Fi Prototype
Initially, the biggest challenge was finding the best way to present the three Services. We brainstormed displaying them in a dropdown menu, a carousel, cards, tabs, an expanding table of contents, or as thumbnails that click to a new page. Here is some of our thinking on paper.
We created cards on the home page and did a combo, long scroll plus interactive table of contents, on the Services page.
Home page
Services flow
Even though the scroll appears long, we had valid reason to design it this way. The three Services are dependant on each other. You can’t do them out of sequence. Because of this, we wanted to present them as a story, a journey, that the user was about to embark on. To have each of them on a separate page was too disconnected, and it didn’t communicate the process.
Next up, when we did our User Testing, we got some very interesting feedback.
User Testing
Testing Plan
Objective:
Ensuring the navigation is easy and intuitive
Questions:
Does the sign up process make sense?
Is the donation process simple enough that it keeps retention?
Tasks:
Apply for a Service
Donate
Results
Some things that we thought were extremely self explanatory in the app… were not obvious to all users. For example, the three cards on the home page confused users. They didn’t understand the cards were items in a section.
Also the interactive Table of Contents on the Services page, was not communicating that it was interactive. Users didn’t realize it would jump down to the section below.
Overall:
There were a lot of positive feedback regarding the look of the prototype
SUS Score of 83.75 - ranking “Excellent”
Iterations
The key changes that needed to be made were:
Emphasize Services
Make it visible and clear to users what the services are
Ensure all interactions are clickable
Create more color contrast
Darker text
Different button colors to make them stand out
Utilize more images
Hi-Fi Prototype
Explore our final high fidelity prototype below.
Strategic choices
The homepage employs familiar visual lexicon. We chose to start with a hero image because that signifies a homepage and the majority of users have come to expect it.
You will see above that we decided not dilute the message of the Services section on the homepage by delving into each individuals service. We also removed an earlier “Our Mission” button so as not to distract from the strategic goal of the site. Services is notably visible above the fold.
Very prominent is the Donate button, supported by paired iconography. Icons can help users grasp the meaning of a word faster, they can contribute to a more appealing UX experience, and they encourage clicking.
Instead of having a page for each Service, we decided to have a long scroll. Long scrolls are actually not a problem for most users. No matter how long the scroll, 22% of users will reach the bottom. Also, the most clicked on links are sometimes at the bottom of a page.^1 + 2
Detailed thinking
We used a blue container to separate the table of contents from the services. We also made the service numbers stand out in a pill shape highlight.
Quotes and statistics can be just as inviting and interesting to users as photography. They are found to focus attention and encourage further investigation.
Instead of having the navigation menu open full screen, like previously, we wanted users to maintain perspective on their current place without being thrown into a completely new screen.
To encourage donations, we created a page to logically and emotionally persuade, and also to continue to give the organization credibility in describing their work.
Upon completing long forms (donation, course application) users are rewarded with a small animation.
Future steps
Continue development on a desktop prototype
Meet with organization to get information for additional pages.
Continue testing, iterating, and getting stakeholder feedback.