How do you get recent college graduates to think twice about buying that $5 coffee and saving that money instead?
That’s the problem Graphic Design juniors were tasked with solving by a senior design team from The Vanguard Group during a weeklong workshop on design thinking.
Six employees from the Malvern-based company—from finance, design and project management—talked with the students about visualizing behavioral finance, creating wealth and saving, and how to apply design thinking, or human-centered design, in creating a product that would help someone save money.
Christine Fischer, head of design for participant strategy and development at Vanguard, told the class how Vanguard practices a very structured approach to projects, using a methodology from the LUMA Institute.
“We brought this thinking to Moore, and we wanted to give the students a problem that was familiar enough to them that they could understand the audience and empathize with the audience because they are the audience,” she said.
TARGET AUDIENCE
The problem they had to solve was: How do we help recent college grads find saving money as desirable as spending it?
During sessions over two days, Vanguard representatives taught the students the five categories of design thinking: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. Then they had the students create personas of clients who need their products, someone who may not be mindful of their spending in a cashless society.
Each of the five student teams then had two days to work on a solution. All five teams created apps. The first group, made up of Chelsea Plummer, Kalista Bracey and Madison Phillips, designed an app they called Interconnect. The social media app promotes connecting with friends and sharing advice on how to save money. “You made saving a status symbol,” said Jennifer Long, art director at Vanguard.
The second team—Kyla Irizarry, Christa Faas and Brooke Friend—made an app called Oofy, meaning ‘rich’ or ‘wealthy.’
“The message is to stop spending money on little things that will add up in the long run,” Faas said. The Vanguard judges gave it an A-plus for its positive reinforcement techniques.
Stacks is the name of the app created by Tianna Wisdom and Oxchzeanna Perez. The user builds a “farm” of savings, with pigs representing a savings goal and a farmer who reminds the saver of their goal. The judges loved the theme, design and the coaching tactics from the farmer.
Giovanna Jones and Sara Johnson made an app called Secure Saver that works inside a user’s banking app. They got props from the judges for having the courage to go big, as well as having the app sync up with social media apps.
Team 5’s app is called FUNDS, designed by Julia Parrick and Grace Painter-Chapman, was praised for its great name and its simplicity in design, and the team was commended for creating a short video showing how the app helps the user to save money.
BLOWN AWAY
“It’s absolutely incredible what they were able to do in less than a week,” said Matt Julin, journey owner in the participant strategy and development division. “The process that we walked them through might have been foreign based on some of the language we used, but it was clearly not foreign to them in the way they executed. I thought it was amazing.”
“I was blown away,” said project manager Chad Kardos. “It was a fantastic transformation in literally five days, so I was quite impressed.”
“I was incredibly impressed by what a professional job they did and what a polished group of presentations they made in one week’s time,” said Greg Spears, editorial manager at Vanguard. “This really does look like it’s ready for the market. It’s commercial quality right now.”
Chelsea Plummer said she loved learning about design thinking and how to strategize throughout the week.
“It made me think differently as a designer,” she said. And as for saving? “I really did think about my finances. I was like, maybe I should be doing stuff like that, maybe I should be saving more.”
