Money Experience
Money Experience developed innovative software and curricula to teach personal finance and quality of life concepts to high school and college aged students. As a founding member of the team, I led UX design and development of the company’s product portfolio from green field, including a highly sophisticated interactive “life simulator” and accompanying administrator portal. In total I brought three platforms to market from research through ideation, concept, design, development and market acceptance. I hired, managed and mentored the marketing, engineering, curriculum development and product development teams, experiencing 0 employee turnover during my 5 year tenure.
During the ideation phase of this product, our research surfaced a strong aversion to teaching financial literacy in the classroom. A primary driver for this was the fact that teachers were uncomfortable teaching the topic when their classrooms featured wide socioeconomic disparity. Our research also showed that most products in the market focused on math, which meant the 50% of students who were not comfortable with math skill would be at an immediate disadvantage.
We set out to create a program guided by a few core principles:
1. Personal finance is about decision making, not math. Let's de-prioritize crunching numbers, and focus on making good choices.
2. Create a program that offers different ideas of success. Unlike other programs, we did not focus on "whomever has the most wins".
3. Students struggle to care because retirement age is too abstract. We needed to create empathy for a student's future self.
Personal finance as decision making
To address this first point, we created a "life simulator" that allowed a student user to make decisions about their life. Starting from the moment of high school graduation, students were asked to choose a college path (including no college and/or military service), choose a career, pick where they'd live (region), whether they'd buy or rent, if they had roommates, who they were dating, if and when to get married and to whom, if and when to start a family, even lifestyle choices like food, fitness, furniture, travel and fun. Every decision the student made had weighted repercussions for their wealth and well being. We walked students from high school all the way to retirement age, asking them to build their lives one carefully considered decision at a time, react to real-world scenarios, and deal with life's "wild card" moments (divorce, injury, job loss, market crashes, etc.).
Quality, not quantity.
Our deceivingly simple life simulator used a sophisticated financial model to power its projections, layering student choices over robust historical macroeconomic trends. We knew, however, that to address the idea that success comes in many forms, we needed to show that life was about more than money. We chose to create a completely new parallel model calculating quality of life. Every decision that a student made would have a financial impact, but it would also affect their happiness.
To accomplish this, we asked students to rank 10 life priorities at the start of each "era" of life. These 10 priorities included family, adventure, career, education, security, luxury, community, health, leisure, and social good. A student's stated priorities were represented by a "priority rose", a chart whose shape was literally one in (several) million and profoundly unique to that user. This infographic served as a shorthand for the condition of their quality of life. For example, if a student chose "adventure" as a high priority but never travelled, it would hurt their quality of life score. To be successful in our program, it meant students were making decisions that were financially sound for their individual income level, and aligned with their stated priorities. As a result, it was possible to be low income and very happy, or rich and miserable - a totally unique concept in the industry.
Empathy for their future selves
The last critical piece was emotion. We wanted to inspire lasting curiosity in students by helping them understand WHY this was so important. We did this with storytelling. We created a cast of diverse, highly related characters from different cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, and each with a distinct personality driving their choices and used a digital graphic novel format to tell their story. We'd use these characters to give emotional context to an important life decision, and then ask the student to choose. Students would see consequences play out in their own dashboards but also with how the lives of these characters zigged and zagged. This format encouraged a student user to understand how they might feel when faced with a major life decision, in ways they may have never considered before. In practice, we found this to be a highly engaging method that helped students form strong opinions about their choices.
Profound results
The result was overwhelming. Students adored our product, with educators regularly telling us that they've never seen their kids so immersed in a classroom platform before. Students would finish the program, and run back through unprompted to make different choices and try to optimize their results, meaning we successfully generated curiosity and introduced students to the concept of modeling their decisions. Students would use the program on their own time, after school. We found that students were more engaged, thought more about the consequences of their decisions, and surveys revealed that dinner table conversations about money dramatically increased with their families.
By the end of my tenure with Money Experience, our platform had been adopted by JP Morgan Chase, Ally Financial, LPL Financial, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, and many more education institutions.
