Google Pay for Gen-Z

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SCOPING

Breaking Down Financial Health

Gladwebs

The Starting Point
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Kick-Off Session With Google Pay Team

We began with the following understanding:

/ Constraints and liberties
/ Pay and Save, not Manage and Invest
/ Different from Wallet app experience
/ Only low-fidelity minus Google identity
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Based on this interaction, we went ahead and outlined a research plan.
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Research Roadmap

For a strong foundational / contextual understanding of the problem, we carried out extensive secondary research on three key aspects of the prompt:
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/ the Gen-Z consumer and their social competencies
/ UX strategies of G-Pay vs competitors
/ a framework to measure financial health

Social Behavior and Personal Finance

Motive: Map the consumer behavior against market offerings
Medium: Secondary research
Mapping: Mind Map, Behavioral Insights

I worked specifically on identifying the social needs of Gen-Z and an assessment of various pay-and-save apps in the market to cater to those needs.

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Gen Z = social + digital + hyper-aware + inclusive‍

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Mindmapping Gen Z's Social Competencies

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How mainstream Pay-and-Save brands fit within Gen-Z's social context

Apart from these, we discovered innovative market players that tap into the cultural environment of Gen-Z users and offer unique value.

Off-beat Apps Targeting Gen-Z

Some of the brilliant strategies used by these apps:
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/ Cooperation (family, friends, money pooling)
/ Competition (daily contests)
/ Conscious activism (climate, politics, community & shared values)
/ Social savings (rewards, group expenses, thrift stores)
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Notes for primary research:
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/ Understand how users feel about involving their network (friends, family, acquaintances or even strangers) in their payments app
/ Identify and validate social group-specific use-cases for pay and save
/ Identify and validate users’ interest in unique, non-cash modes of transactions
/ Understand if users' association with a social cause helps them save better
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GPay’s Functional Experience

Motive: Assess the current app experience to identify gaps
Medium: Heuristic analysis
Mapping: User flows

Current Pay / Save Experience

Findings from this mapping:
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/ Inconsistent information architecture
/ Non-intuitive grouping of elements
/ Incomprehensible information
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Competitors' UX Study

Motive: Relative and absolute strengths of other players
Medium: Competitor benchmarking
Mapping: Comparison matrices

Benchmarking P2P Pay-and-Save Apps

Financial Health Landscape

Motive: Reach the target audience
Medium: Secondary research
Mapping: Framework for Fin Health

To break it down at a high level, we looked at the 4 pillars of long-term financial survival as outlined by United Nations.
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Pillars and Indicators of Financial Health

Interestingly, these 4 elements align well with FHN's indicators to measure financial health: Spend, Save, Borrow and Plan.

SCOUTING

People, problems and opportunities

Finding Participants

Motive: Identify ideal participants for 1:1 interviews
Medium: Screener survey
Mapping: Coping Risk Areas

Our screener focused on target demographics and financial health indicators to quantifically select individuals representing coping and vulnerable 18-24 year olds for 1:1 interviews.
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Using the data gathered from the screener, we were able to create an accurate snapshot of our users’ perceived financial health.
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Our average participant scored below the FHN’s standard for financial health. Three out of the four financial health indicators fall within the coping zone, and that “Pay" is perceived by our users to be the least at risk. Using our new FinHealth framework, we find that Resilience, Goal-Achievement, and Confidence are all below the financially healthy mark.
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This confirmed our previous assessment: yes, Gen Z is struggling with their finances, but the majority of their pain lies in future-based content, not present.

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Being financially healthy means you don’t just function well in the present, but that you plan for the future as well.

Opportunity Hunting

I led the ‘How Might We' exercise within the group.

/ Individual brainstorming: Total 60 HMW statements
/ Clustering into focused categories as per common themes
/ Prioritizing through dot voting based on what we perceived to be valuable as per secondary research.

As a class, we decided that any cluster with 4+ votes was worthy of further exploration.

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How Might We?

Now we were eager to understand them on an even deeper level. That's where the interview and affinitization process began.

SCOOPING

Human stories

To dive deeper into the lives of underrepresented Gen-Z individuals and discover the hurdles they faced in managing their finances, I curated an interview protocol document.

Money is a double-edged sword: it can make you feel comfortable and secure, but also confused and scared. ‍

Listening to their stories and coping mechanisms was interesting and humbling.
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When purchasing something, I sometimes have to think that if I buy this, what will I have to give up or what will I be eating next week.

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The fear of not having enough money is the biggest encouragement for me to save.

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Knowing how much money I may be spending unnecessarily definitely makes me feel guilty.

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42 total hours of recorded content from 28 separate interviews resulted in 13 very interesting and thought provoking insights, each highlighting a different aspect of our users’ current situation.

These insights became the guiding light for the project.
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Affinitization of User Inputs
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below one is for the script + example / gallery:

So imp to stay aligned at every step - meticulously derived insights
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Highlights

There was a dire need for an individualized, flexible experience that grows with the users.
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Gen Z is struggling financially, but they’re all struggling in fundamentally different ways.

SPECULATING

From insight
to hypotheses

At this point, we split into teams based on inclination towards high-level problem areas + skills. This paid off beautifully and was greatly appreciated by the Google team.
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Combining of Research Insights to Identify Opportunities - I

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Combining of Research Insights to Identify Opportunities - II
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Blue Sky Ideation:
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We shortlisted 3 solid ideas through dot-voting:
#7: Visualizing goals
#8: Tapping the social network for the push to save
#10: Adding Friction - lock the money

Thinking tracks:
Self-control
FOMO
Out of sight, out of mind
External motivation
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Hypothesis process:
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Hypothesis #1 & Corresponding Success Metric

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Hypothesis # 2 & Corresponding Success Metric

SKETCHING

Early ideas

For these two hypotheses, we started to mindmap the branches of thought. This led us to identify interesting themes to ideate our concepts.
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Visualizing Goals: Mindmap Themes

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Visualizing Goals: Low-Fidelity Sketches

We followed the same approach to land the second concept.
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Networking: Mindmap Themes

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Networking: Low-Fidelity Sketches

We continued to integrate more details into those early ideas.

Brainstorming and Peer Review
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Supplemental Research

Resting on Laurels: When the distance to a goal is far away, sub-goals can help reduce uncertainty in users and increase effort. Conversely, when users perceive the achievement of the goal as certain and nearby, sub-goals will generate complacency.

The psychology of saving and collections:
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Metaphors to establish an emotional connection with the process of saving:

Money Jars, Pockets, Piggy Bank, Ice Cubes, Vault, ATM, Wishing Well

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Prototyping the user flows:
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TESTING

..failing and pivoting

Testing Goals:
1 - To understand if consumers feel an emotional response to the screens provided, and whether these reactions inspire them to pursue savings goals
2 - To understand if users feel comfortable speaking about finances within the app environment we have created - does it resonate with them
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Here is the testing guide I designed to record tasks and user inputs.
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Seeking Guidance

We reached out to the GPay product team with questions:
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- How to step back and validate the need of the concept?
- How do you test a visual concept without any visual cues?
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Looking Ahead

1 - We decided to strip the mock-ups of any visual elements to prevent bias.

2 - We dropped the Trust Network idea as it did not indicate strong unanimous user need/interest. While some participants appreciated the comfort of anonimity, the concept still needed some deliberation into how the experience can make users feel secure.

Step 1

Domain Research

Motive: Understand jargon, user groups, hierarchies, tasks, timelines, processes & dependencies involved in Revenue Collection.

Medium: Orientation meetings

Maps: Process workflow, Revenue Collection Lifecycle

Step 2

Competitor keyword analysis

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Step 3

Optimization analysis

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Creating content that converts

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Ongoing optimization and support

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See our

web design process

DETAILING

the concept

Stitching the end-to-end user journey

User Journey Mapping: All Concepts Combined
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Brainstorming the features

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When it comes to saving money:
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Consistency > Intensity
System > Goal
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A feature which allows you to set saving goals and assign custom visuals to them.
You will have to power to add to your saving goals (either manually or automatically), and they are presented within a visual collection.
Once goals are completed, you will be able to earn and share achievement badges with your friends.
Additionally, you will be prompted with smart insights on ways to improve savings habits.
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Creating User Value

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✓ Stop excessive overspending: Add barriers to accessing funds, then visualize the impact of their use
✓ Enable healthy spending habits: Don’t fully discourage spending money, but recommend its healthy usage
✓ Realize achievable goals: Break down and categorizes savings goals, then visualize their accomplishment
✓ Act as an empathetic guide: Understand that no one is perfect, but don’t smooth over bad decisions

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By developing a future-forward savings system based on gamified psychology, we can enable financially vulnerable Gen-Z to engage with their values today while preparing for tomorrow.

From Concept to Feature: user story, feature and benefit (User Acceptance Criteria)
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As a [role], I want to [goal] so that [benefit]
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Stories to Features

Mockups
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We ended up just using progress bar to not take away the attention from the core idea.

The team also ideated a visual skin library, with personality-based styles such as,
Purist / Naturalist / Gamer / Kinesthetics, and documented it for future roadmap.
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Step 1