Ongoing Masters Thesis Project

Capital One (Sponsored)

Uncovering how social media affects Gen Z's financial well-being, and designing solutions to better support them.

TEAM

Manuni Dhruv (Designer), Jahnavi (Designer),

Meghna Melkote (Industry Mentor, Product Designer, Capital One)

Dr. Carrie Bruce (Advisor)

TIMELINE

August 2024 - ongoing

TOOLS

Figma, FigJam, Dovetail, Qualtrics

ROLE

Research and scoping,

Design and ideation,

Facilitating discussions with mentor and advisor

CONTEXT

Gen Z is changing the way we make sense of money in the digital world.

Gen Zer's (often called "Digital Natives") —the first generation to grow up with the internet as a part of daily life.

From trends like "loud budgeting" on TikTok and comprehensive Reddit threads on investing, Gen Z has more financial information accessible to them than ever before.

Capital One wants us to know how they can strategically lean into this space of Gen Z behaviors and social media. How can we then inform the capital one mobile/website experience?


What Capital One wants from us

Our project and learning goals are:

Our motivation for this project is compounded by the prevalence of majorly app-like solutions in the fintech space. We want to break this perception by exploring smart design approaches in the fintech space that go beyond tracking and budgeting.


Uncovering how social media affects Gen Z's financial well-being, and designing solutions to better support them.

CURRENT GUIDING STATEMENT

To guide research efforts and identify problems

HERE'S THE PLAN TO GET THERE

Design Process

RESEARCH

Explore correlations within Gen Z financial needs, goals, social media and bank app preferences.

Preliminary Survey | 83 participants

How does social media content influence Gen Z's thinking patterns about personal finance?

Diary Study | 4 participants

Gain a thorough understanding of the Gen Z landscape through lit reviews and surveys with a larger sample size.

Secondary Research | 5 Articles and External Surveys

Designed with care, coffee and countless all-nighters.

JAHNAVI KOLAKALURI © 2024

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Case study in progress.

Research synthesis is currently underway.