Work: Currently a Design Manager at Meta.
Education: Currently a Ph.D. student in Design at Carnegie Mellon University. I earned a Master's in Strategic Design & Management from Parsons School of Design. I also earned a BS in Entrepreneurship and a BA in International Studies from the University of Utah.
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How might we reimagine the interface design to build trust with consumers, maintain the Intuit brand identity, and give clear and direct control to consumers and show through progressive disclosure how consumer's data is shared ?
In today’s consumer-centric, digitally-driven era, some of the most notable names in the financial data ecosystem are coming together to help consumers and businesses make informed financial decisions by sharing their financial data safely and conveniently.
Co-created with the Intuit to design mobile Interfaces for Financial Data Exchange. This was then adopted by Intuit team as the interface design as consumers access their Intuit Mint portal through the FDX platform
October - November 2019
Mint.com is a free financial management service that uses Intuit’s service to connect users’ financial accounts. It encrypts users’ information and stores it in a secure database.
Many third party apps require access to the user's financial data in order to help them. For example, an app helping users make good spending decisions or offer users a loan must access a holistic view of the user’s finances. Each time a third-party app asks for users’ financial data, users choose whether to give consent; in the specific case of Intuit Mint, the app needed to allow users to select which financial data to offer the third party, since full access to their encrypted database would increase risks.
Intuit Mint's goal in this project was how to disclose to the consumer what data is being shared, with whom, for what purpose, and for how long. The new app needed to comply with FDX guidelines for transparency, clearly disclosing what data is being shared with whom, why, and for how long.
Our task choice architecture design was to develop the Intuit Mint experience within the Financial Data Exchange platform. What will the experience design look like for consumers who have an account with Intuit Mint? How will the process of disclosing data look? What choice architecture design methods will be used to decide where and when user information is displayed, and what will the user journey be like?
In an era where data is the new oil, financial institutions and user-base platforms have made an immense push to safeguard consumers' data. Banks need to build trust with their customers and help keep them informed and educated about the decisions they make with financial data. This is especially true when third parties ask users for “consent” to access users’ financial information.
The heart of the matter is data sharing. Consumers are understandably sensitive about sharing their personal financial information, especially in light of recent breaches that have compromised confidential records, affecting millions of people. At the same time, authorized data sharing enables a wide range of personal finance applications that have transformed the way we manage our money and our lives, from money management tools such as Mint to cost-sharing tools such as Venmo. In fact, a recent study found that 63 percent of smartphone users have at least one financial app installed.
With 20 million users, Mint attracts a wide user base. Its service extends throughout the United States and Canada. According to its website in 2019, more than 70% of its users pay off their credit card balances each month -- suggesting that Mint users are far more intentional with their finances than average. Therefore, the average Mint user may be willing to sacrifice some time in order to feel greater confidence in their understanding of a financial process or decision.
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Rama Kumar
Graphic Designer
Age: 28 Gender: Male
Rama studied Graphic Design at his university in Alberta, Canada where he lives with his wife and two children. He manages his family’s finances and enjoys investing, though financial preparation is also a value he learned from his single mother.
Lydia Gilzean
Associate Instructor of Art History
Age: 36 Gender: Female
Lydia teaches art history at a community college in Arizona. She uses Mint to budget her personal finances and will soon use it to verify her financial information for a deposit on an apartment.
Giving access to bank information is a common and necessary process, though it can cause users anxiety and does involve risk. The Mint Intuit consent design needed to offer satisfactory answers to big questions held by its users: “Is this transaction secure?” “Can I trust this third-party app?” “Should I give consent?”
The interface helps consumers with the ability to securely share data in a way that is visible and transparent and will empower customers, enterprises, and small businesses to have a better financial life.
Having a feedback loop with users was essential in co-creating questions and solutions through the information design process. Through research, interviews, and design workshops, we constructed high-fidelity prototypes that were given to users for full testing.
Though we had different demographics for the in-person testing, the feedback was similar and we discovered more financial pressures experienced by customers: making more money, reducing their debt, and saving more for education. Users were eager to understand how this process can help them secure more financial help.
63 percent of smartphone users have at least one financial app installed
Understand what data is being shared, with whom, for what purpose, and for how long
The new design spells out how the consumer consent of financial data is securely shared and clarifies the security and authentication protocol requirements.
On the technology side, FDX incorporates leading-edge features such as OpenID Connect, which helps assure the validity of financial information, and biometric authentication for enhanced security.
We needed to match Intuit Mint’s own distinctive style guide and solve several constraints in design, working within the guidelines of Intuit Mint’s integration platforms and structure. In addition, the interface would communicate dense information. The challenge was to make sense of the design hierarchy, design an intervention that abides by financial regulations, platform technologies requirements, and achieve them using the design pieces given to us.