Financial well-being is a tricky thing to measure, yet greatly affects people’s lives. CFPB created a survey and an online interactive tool that helps people understand their financial well-being.
- Date: 2015-2018
- Role: Lead Product Designer, co-UX researcher
- Stakeholders: Subject Matter Experts in the Office of Financial Education.
- Audience: Any American consumer who wants to learn more about their finances and people working with financial counselors to improve their well-being
- Problem: Creating an online tool to help people understand their financial status and direct them to resources that can help
Survey
The 10 question survey allows consumers to rank themselves over a few measures. Part of making a score meaningful is adding context so that people know how to interpret it. CFPB surveyed and analyzed Americans’ scores to create a solid foundation of data about their average financial well-being, as well as which characteristics or lifestyle factors correlate with higher or lower scores.
Take the survey and see your results: consumerfinance.gov/consumer-tools/financial-well-being
Selected questions from the financial well-being quiz
Journeymap of how the Financial Well-Being tool would work
How the tool works
The lead User Experience Research and I mapped out the flow of how the tool would work and the pain points. This activity helped the stakeholders craft the survey and scoring.
Visualizing Financial Well-Being Scores
One drawback of the 92 point scoring system is that people tend to think it's like a school grading system, where a 60 would be a C- and not a great score. In this system, a 60 would be significantly higher than average.
We tried several visualization methods like histograms and iterated after testing with users, who found most visuals too complex to understand. We ended up with a simple color bar and two markers.
Visual representation of a person’s financial well-being score and the US average score
Score Comparison
To give users more context about their score, we displayed data for age, household income and employment status along with the average financial well-being score. A simple line marker that pulls in color from the bar ended up being the most effective way to visualize this comparison.
Chart showing average financial well-being scores of people with different household incomes
Featured Content and Hero Illustrations
I brainstormed and collaborated with my colleagues at the bureau to create a cohesive set of feature images for the project that were displayed across the website and social media to bring attention to the survey and data.
Report Graphics
I collaborated and art directed better graphics for the full report to give users a brief overview of the scores and a quick look at overall trends for each section of characteristics.
View the full report consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-reports/financial-well-being
Or download the data consumerfinance.gov/data-research/financial-well-being-survey-data
