Goldmansachs

Valance
SVA x Goldman Sachs

About

Valance is a socially responsible investment app specialized in climate change for Millennials and Gen Z investors who want to take a climate action and invest in sustainable industry for a long term.

My Role

Conducting two user interviews out of 14 user interviews
Conducting secondary research, 5 competitors analysis and synthesis
Designing lo-fi wireframe
Creating user persona, user journey and user flow
Creating font design system
Designing high-fidelity prototype for green market and donation pages
Creating interview questions and conducting 14 interview analysis
Leading weekly sponsor meeting presentation

Duration

4 Months | Sep 2022 - Dec 2022

Team

Amogh Ghapure
Sunwoo Park
Sukyong Kwon
Jin Hee Jung

Tools

Figma
After Effects
Miro
Anima
Protopie

Guide

Roger Mader
Chriswell Lappin
Goldman Sachs

Discover & Background

Gen Z and Millennials have experienced so many life-changing social issues in a short time. They actively want to drive societal change in everyday lives and believe that change is possible if people and organizations continue the action.

Before conducting the interview, my team and I wanted to know more about our challenge's background and the target user in general. We began our research by looking into different characteristics of two young generations, millennials and Gen Z. Thus, how do they think about the current society and how their recognition of society has changed after experiencing the pandemic.

What I learned was that these two generations were notably different from older generations; They are more aware of social issues that are happening right now and feel the issues more deeply in their everyday lives. They also continue to engage in the actions through social media.

User Interview

In-Depth interviews and three collaborative activities with 14 millennials and Gen Z from diverse backgrounds living the US and outside of the US.

We conducted multi-methodology research to better understand the user's core goals and needs. For each research method, we set the specific research questions from which we want answers. Through the interviews, we wanted to know their investment goals, challenges, and what social news they are mostly catching up on.

My team chose 14 interviewees from their early 20s to early 30s from multiple countries because they are the perfect age range of target users and we wanted to know what young generations are mostly interested in globally. During the interview, I found out these interviewees also had less experience in investment and primarily worked in the non-financial field.

Interview Goals

Understand the investing patterns millennials and Gen Z generations
What social issue that they think to be priorly discussed regardless of borders.
Besides investing, what other things their are interested in and they willing to focus more?

Key Insights from the interviews & Secondary Research

33% of millennials and Gen Z think the climate change are the most significant current issue that should be solved.

1. Transparency — Investor wants to know where their money is invested, especially in a social issue

3. People are not reluctant as such to help communities

5. They now have a financial constraints but in a long term they plan on invest more in sustainability

7. 80% of Millennial investors expressed interest in investing solution that seek to help climate change

2. Millennials and Gen Z prefer to buy sustainable brands and interested in sustainable investment

4. Millennials and Gen Zs are actively seeking to influence policy and business actions on matters that are important to them, including environmental issues

6. They have their own ethical standard of investing.

8. Validation — To have a feeling that they actually helped others/community through activity they’ve done

Narrowing down the scope

I was able to find more pain points and opportunities from millennials and gen z who are less experienced on investment and interested in sustainability. Based on the insights, my team and I embodied our initial challenge by narrowing down just ‘Millennial and gen z’ to ‘Novice millennial and gen z investors who also hope to take an action in social issues'

Synthesizing

Finding a design opportunity

After narrowing down the target user group and challenge, I synthesized all findings to find opportunities to solve their pain points during the journey of socially responsible investment. Through this session, I could decide what my team will focus on for the platform key features.

Competitor Analysis

Understanding the market trends and users need

Before deciding on our features, we analyzed five relevant products with different characteristics to understand the current market and user needs, from a traditional general stock market app to a socially responsible stock investment app. I led the analysis and research of existing financial investment and banking apps.

I learned from this analysis that many socially responsible stocks weren't curated based on specific climate change issues and did not have enough explanation. So this could be the opportunity to make a dedicated space for stocks related to climate sustainability.

Information Architecture

Platform Ecosystem

Defining the inevitable constraints and capabilities for design solutions

To support the design solution, I reorganized our key features, capabilities, and inevitable constraint by defining the platform ecosystem. Since it is a financial investment platform, we had situational constraints such as a policy that individuals could not change. However, we expanded our creativity to improve the solutions under the limitation after this process.

Final Prototype

Personal Stock Curation

Users can choose the specific climate issue they are interested in in the onboarding stage. Valance curates personalized stock lists based on their choice of issues.

Green Market & Investment :
Transparency Matters

We found out many young investors have a strong interest in investing in solutions to climate change. Also, they want to keep track of their investment when it is especially related to social issues.
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We offer a green market, which is curated with only stocks and funds green industry. The app automatically shows the most relatable stock lists with your choice during the onboarding. The user can easily invest in the companies which work on the issues that the user is primarily interested in.
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It also provides the users with an ESG rating, diversity, equity info, and sustainable activity report.

Donation:
Validation/Engaging with the community

Through our research, we learned that our users are active community members and are not reluctant to help others. Therefore we designed a donation feature where the user can also support the climate action non-profit organizations.

The organizations are also carefully curated, users can have a tax benefit after the donation, and it helps the user to keep an interest in climate issues in the long term.

Share with Others

People can create lists of stock they are investing or interested in. They can share their lists with their friends and family whenever they want to ask advice on the investment or just want to introduce stocks they are investing in.

Takeaways & Next Steps

With after production feedbacks, our team set future updates for the project. As the interview results show, lots of our target users are interested in diverse social issues, we hope to involve sectors for women's empowerment, black empowerment, and other social issues. Thus introducing an indigenous incentives system focusing on local green products to help our users also support climate action through supporting local businesses.

Next Steps

We got overall positive feedback from our sponsors(Goldman Sachs), target user group, and presentation panel. The whole project stages also deepen my understanding of financial investment, which I have not experienced often. Defining the circumstances the designer could change or couldn't change was challenging since the external social factors weren't the aspects that individuals could entirely shift. However, I learned the value of redefining and focusing on issues through this. It helped us realize our assumptions early on and revise our research. So we could re-aim the newly defined statement for better solutions, making our design decisions more robust.

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