Developing inclusive research practices to drive financial inclusion and equity.

Ask

Our interdisciplinary team was tasked with creating an experience for a historically underrepresented community.

Approach

We recognized that we needed to hear from the right consumers to help inform the development of this experience. Nothing for us, without us, became our team’s motto. However, accessing traditionally underrepresented consumers through our vendors proved to be a challenge. We had to think critically about how and when we heard from our consumers.

Discovery

First, we gathered our questions and what we knew from existing internal and external work into a research audit. This helped us identify what questions we still had to answer to deliver a product that was entirely rooted in the voice of our consumers. Once we set up recruitment pipelines that better helped us reach our target consumers, discovery work was primarily done via in-depth interviews, over 10 online surveys, and more than 15 hours of conversations with community partners.

Insights

Context. Context. Context. We kicked off insights socialization with stakeholders with a bias workshop, in which we acknowledged our own biases and centered ourselves around data. This helped us hold ourselves and each other accountable during difficult discussions around the racial wealth gap and financial inclusion. Insights were then always framed in context to ensure that stakeholders were taking away the correct message, since we learned that finances don’t exist in a vacuum.

Validation

Design, product, and business stakeholders were invited to observe 2 rounds of usability testing and concept validation interviews with consumers to develop a stronger relationship with consumers. Designs were iterated on, almost in real-time, based on feedback from our audience.

Launch

The experience was successfully launched in October 2023, with a goal to drive greater financial inclusion and to meet consumers where they are. Our research was key in infusing the end-to-end product lifecycle, from development to launch, with the voice of the consumer and driving strategic decisions with our target audience in mind. We also worked closely with our marketing and branch teams to ensure that consistent messaging rooted in customer insights was being used in every experience.

Takeaways

• Hosting a bias workshop at the start of the project helped center key stakeholders around the customers and helped us have the hard conversations as they came up. Want to learn more about bias workshops? Join me on June 12-13, 2024 at QuantUXCon to learn more!

• Research pipelines are not currently designed to reach underrepresented consumers. Holding vendors accountable for delivering a representative sample was key to hearing from the right audience.

• The voice of the consumer is key through every part of the product lifecycle. Hearing from consumers helped shape the ask, identify gaps, develop scope, and inform designs. Infusing the voice of the consumer throughout the project lifecycle also ensured that stakeholders were bought into the end goal and held us all accountable to doing this work, right.