How understanding a culture informed a product design

The problem to solve: Create an onboarding experience and user flow for an education savings app targeted towards young Filipina parents. As an employee of Manulife’s regional office in Hong Kong, I needed first-hand knowledge of the Philippines operation and target users.

Using the methodology: As a new resident of Hong Kong, this was my first UX challenge in Asia. One thing I quickly learned was our different operations had very different audiences. When given this project that was specific to the Philippines, my first priority was do do my empathising exercises on site in Manila.

I had some discussions with our excellent product owner and arranged a visit to the office with two objectives. First was to talk to actual users, second was to define our onboarding user flow. Because our product owner was a new mother herself, I asked her to use local mothers groups and maybe some friends from her daycare to build our focus group.

During the focus group, I observed how personal and emotional the subjects were towards the apps they use and the way they viewed planning their children’s future. The most passionate answers came from mothers who did not go to university themselves and desperately wanted their  children to have that advantage.

Along with that, we learned how much the group expected to put into the savings account, the frequency and how they expected to track the progress of their account.

The next day, we compared our notes and built personas of our users. We used those notes to whiteboard a user flow that was to include very aspirational and emotional imagery and copy. This went counter to typical Manulife copy that very informational and text heavy, as it would not have resonated with our Philippines users.

Building the Prototype: The app’s first touchpoint after download was a simple and emotional carousel to set expectations for the user. What followed was a simple sign-on form. The testing prototype was built in Sketch so I could continue to collaborate with the product owner and stakeholders. When we had a proper approved prototype, we did some final testing with users for feedback and usability. Only minor tweaks to the copy were needed to ensure the instruction to fill the form was clear.

Outcome and Impact: GradMaker was a widely downloaded app that had high retention to the users. In the 2018 Boomerang Awards in the Philippines, GradMaker won the gold medal for program/service.