Final Project

My final project was completed with 3 other classmates (Peter La, Babak Assadi, Zach Jama). Our project was based the need for teenagers to obtain financial knowledge. The product we came up with was a online game-based interactive game called Money Sense.

The design process we went through included:

Phase 1. Needs Analysis

In this phase, we determined a need that was in the scope of being tackled within a 2-3 month project. We thought about the different types of businesses in finance and found banks to be suitable for tackling this need. We roughly defined the customers as teenagers and/or young adults who would most benefit from an increase in financial knowledge.

Phase 2. User Research

Upon talking to students in NUS, we determined that financial knowledge should be taught from a young age to have a significant impact once they are older. With this in mind, we chose our target audience to be in the range of 12 to 21 years old. We defined them to be people who do not have a good financial background but have an interest to learn.

Phase 3. Proposed Product

The proposed product is an online game which allows users to become interested about financial management. The product would be offered by a bank. The incentive for parents to sign up their kids for this is discounts of banking fees. Ideally, the game would be fun, and the users would recommend it to their friends.

Phase 4. Low Fidelity Solution

For the low fidelity solution, we created a game on paper. The user would read short paragraphs describing a story-like scenario. At the end of a paragraph, the user would be confronted with a decision (i.e. save your money or spend it). The game progresses based on the users inputs. The feedback we got for this low fidelity solution was that it was too intensive for the user, and that it needs to be more fun than informative.

Phase 5. High Fidelity Solution

The low fidelity solution we created of the game was a modified version of Jeopardy. The questions are separated in different categories, and each question had a bet associated with it. The game was created in MS Access, while the welcome page is built on html. The feedback we got was that the game on MS Access created a discontinuity in the user experience. I.e. there was a break/pause between the website and accessing the game. Also, there were some comments abut the colour scheme and use of graphics.

Phase 6. Evaluation

Based on user testing and user evaluation, we were able to roughly gauge how well our product performed. We moved the game from MS Access to an actual web game as a result of the feedback. In addition, we added some features that the users requested. Having made these changes, we saw improvements in the evaluation of our product.