April Yang
I am a UX designer who innovate and inspire
Meet Emma
- A virtual peer who helps improve financial literacy
March- April, 2014
The fact that high school students are falling behind in financial literacy is a serious problem in today’s education. Students graduate from high school and face critical life decisions related to financial issues. It’s dangerous to make those decisions without a proper understanding of basic financial concepts.
Emma is a virtual peer to solve this problem. Meet Emma is an iPad app that enables user to learn financial topics through interactions with Emma. Emma reacts differently according to the learner’s performance and would be telling her story to engage the learner throughout the learning process.
This is a course project of The Role of Technology in the 21st Century at Carnegie Mellon University.
Teammate: Jack Butler
My Roles: Visual Designer| UI Designer | Interaction Designer | UX Designer
Contributions: All visual design| | UI Designer | Interaction design | UX design
Process: Literature Review | Competitve Analysis | Survey | Prototype
Survey + Literature Review + Competitive Analysis
We conducted a survey, literature review and competitive analysis to find out the real need of our targeted users and the untapped area in this field.
According to our research, high school students reported that they feel unprepared to face the complex world in terms of financial issues. About 51% of the students surveyed said they wish their current high school offered financial literacy instructions. And 70% of them reported that they want to learn more about finance.
Below are the rough design of the screens and how the content look like. We collected peer feedback and improved the look and feel based on this design.
Rough Design
The target user of this educational app are high school students and college underclassmen who comes from upper-middle class family with low level of financial literacy.
Below is a quote from one of the representative users.
Learner Profile
Here is the final design of Meet Emma. I created different looks in order to give Emma various emotions and make her more lively. The interface is also improved by being more appealing and interactive.
Final Design & Future Opportunity
The future opportunity for this app is to make it available to more digital platforms, such as mobile apps and educational websites. The contents and interactions would have to be changed based on the features of the platforms.