Democritizing financial literacy

Role: Senior Interaction Designer

Team for this project: Researcher, Financial Planner, and me

Society of Grownups was the brain child of IDEO and MassMutual. It was a financial literacy startup fully funded by MassMutual with both a physical and online location.
The mission was to make it easy for people to understand and talk about money by democritizing financial literacy.
When I was there, I was a UX Designer, doing product management, service design and research.The two major initiatives I worked on were Online Classes and research for the Task Builder product.
As a small, but mighty team, we scaled Online Classes from an idea, tested with 12 individuals, to a real time online class enterprise experience for 150+. The classes were in real time, because we were trying to replicate the rich, community experience of the physical space (SoG location in Brookline).

Unboxing the SoG Online Class materials

In order to recreate the rich community experience of an in person class to the online space, we felt a piece of the experience had to be physical, and share the same brand experience as the physical space.

So, when we tested and ran the class with the first 12 participants, we decided to send their materials necessary for the class (a camera, instructions, etc.), in a SoG worthy way.

Online Class interaction model

After we ran the first Online Class, we held collaborative working sessions with the participants to get a deeper perspective into how they felt about the experience, and how it could be better.

During that session, we realized how much the physical SoG space helps to create the right atmosphere for an in person class, and how that was lacking in the online space. We realized there was a ladder of needs in order for the rich, community experience to be replicated in virtual space.

Online Class in action

Our first Online Classes' corporate client asked us to create an online class for 150+ people. Up to this point, we had run one for 12.

We ended up using an Adobe platform owned by the client, and created real time activities, just as there are activities in an in person class.

We ended up maintaining an over 70% engagement rate throughout the entire class, and the client was thrilled with the result.