Last project in CIID before starting with the final thesis and industry project session: Service Design on Financial Life.
This time I am in team with Elena, Jacek, Ulrik and Benoit, all people I already worked with before. You may recognize in Jacek the Human Bee and in Elena the Ideas Sharpener for example.
Our project was a big process through a final outcome, rich of user testing and iterations of prototypes to evaluate/change our concept up to get to the final outcome. As a group, I can say that we have a tremendous group user journey through different stages!
We started with a basic concept:
_Empowering consumers by creating big groups to have better deals with banks and company.
Our first hypothesis was addressing the particular case of people needing individual loans. What if , instead of going one by one to the bank for ask for they money, people could get together to ask for a bigger one in order to get a better interest rate?
Would then people trust the other people in the group, regards their seriousness of giving back the money and do not harm the group?
In order to test this first concept, we build the TABLE GAME and we went to users to ask for feedback. We asked them to imagine they were going to buy a car. First, they have to imagine to sit on the orange table and write on the table cloth all the people they would like to invite for a meeting about suggestions. This part was just to make our user comfortable with the topic of money, relationships, trust.
Then, we changed the table and we start using the pink one. Same need_buying a car, but around the table we told to the user that other people with the same need were sitting. All wanted a car, all needed a loan. Some of the people were unknown by the user.
At this point we asked the user the particular question we were trying to get feedbacks about:
_What if, knowing that you could get a better deal with the bank such as a lower interest rate, you all sitting at this table could ask for a collective loan together? Would you go for it with people that you don’t know?
The response was that all the users could recognize of the great power and potential of a group in front of a bank or financial institution in order to deal for better deal, BUT nobody was willing to share a loan with unknown people. Not even with familiars some of them. Trust cannot be build like that and relationships need to be protected from the mess/dirtiness the money implies.
Only one user said “MAYBE” to the collective loan and that was enough for us to go on with another iteration of our concept, this time building the group on a web platform. That was another chance for our concept to be evaluated by another user.
Same game, but know we introduced the INTERNET…
learning by messing around 