Harshveen’s Product Playbook
Building a product for the 68.7% who struggle with financial decisions.
UX Research
Product Design
A data-driven research study on financial customer behavior and the psychology behind financial advisory.
In 2021, I explored how COVID-19 reshaped the financial services landscape by conducting interviews with financial advisors and everyday users. We discovered that only a small number of people actively consult financial advisors. Most individuals are either unaware of the benefits of professional financial guidance or rely heavily on family and friends for advice.
Seeing this gap as an opportunity, in a team of 4, I conducted extensive market research, developed user personas and empathy maps, understood user behavior patterns, and identified the challenges faced by both financial advisors and common users. Based on these insights, I designed an app as the solution to provide a more direct and effective medium for users to connect with financial advisors.
Based on our customer behavior research in 2021
If users are provided with an accessible platform that builds trust and awareness around professional financial advice, more individuals will choose to consult certified advisors instead of relying on friends and family.
With this hypothesis, I developed two user personas: Financial Advisors and Common People, to understand their respective perspectives and emotions toward financial advisory.
We interviewed Chartered accounts, CFP license holders and Tech professionals spanning the two personas and scheduled 30-minute remote interviews with 10 purposively recruited LinkedIn participants, complemented by quick 20-minute individual in-person sessions with 5 humans within our immediate network. Total interviews performed, 30. Insights gained, Invaluable.
We asked Informative questions like
Can a working CA work on paid consultancy projects?
What is the process of working? Client discovery?
What are the most common services availed by your client?
How efficient is the current traditional method of client interact?
Can a CA/CFA work as a freelancer while being employed at a firm?
Empathetic questions like,
On a scale of 1 to 5, how confident are you about planning your finances or investments?
Who do you go to for financial advice?
How often do you think about taking expert advice for your financials?
What are the services you're looking to avail from the financial expert?
How’s the experience of connecting with an advisor currently?
Opportunity questions like
Have you tried freelancing on a platform? If yes what did you like/dislike about it?
What are some services provided by Financial Experts, which are important but less known to people from non financial background?
Will you be interested in a platform where you can connect directly with a dedicated financial expert?
How much time can you dedicate for paid online consultation?
Empathy Map based on interview sessions and survey data
Friends & family path trades certainty for anxiety, whereas certified advisors trade one conversation for a decision you can own.
I created this journey map on Miro to highlight how users felt at various stages of their financial journey.This map provides insights into where to begin addressing key issues and where to conclude improvements. User frustrations start right in the exploration stage and continue to increase as they struggle to find the desired result, so our primary focus is to start improving the journey at the exploration stage for better later-stage outputs.
User Journey Map based on interview sessions
“How might we create an effective medium to connect certified financial experts to common people?”
By bringing both sides together on a single platform, we aim to democratize financial advisory making it more accessible, transparent, and personalized for everyone. Retail users can easily sign up, explore verified financial advisors on the application based on their needs, and access trusted guidance from anywhere, whereas Financial advisors can list their services, build credibility, expand their client base, and grow their independent practice. In a nutshell, the application is a “trusted, beginner-friendly gateway” platform that connects retail users to certified financial professionals, starting with education + discovery → then advisory match → then ongoing support.
Every competitor promised access to a financial advisor, none actually delivered it. No confirmations, no live chat, no certainty of who you're talking to or when.
For competitive analysis, I identified competitors that aimed to solve the same problem. Completed onboarding steps on their platform and tried getting financial help. Understood the navigation structures, and went through customer feedback to identify points and areas of improvement.
The target brands were Fiverr, FundsIndia, & Scripbox. I performed a SWOT analysis to understand their application’s key weaknesses and later included those weaknesses in our solution’s strengths.
See competitive SWOT analysis dataThe flowchart outlines how the finding financial help would be streamlined in our application.
Starting from the home screen, users can explore promotional services, search for specific services, view all services, or directly access advisor profiles. The journey progresses through service selection, slot booking, and payment of consultation fees, culminating in confirmation receipts sent to users via email or phone. Simultaneously, advisors receive notifications and access their dashboards to manage bookings. This structured flow prioritizes simplicity and efficiency, addressing the communication gap between users and advisors while ensuring a user-centric experience.
I worked with developers to utilize the Impact Effort Matrix and the MoSCoW Approach to define rthe MVP features. We did this to balance resources in hand and the project delivery timeline.
The Impact Effort Matrix helped prioritize features by focusing on "Quick Wins" like account creation, booking slots, and generating offline meeting links, which deliver high impact with low effort. Simultaneously, the MoSCoW framework categorized features into Must-Have, Should-Have, Could-Have, and Won’t-Have. For example, essential elements like information visibility, accessibility, and a responsive user interface were marked as Must-Haves, ensuring they form the backbone of the MVP.
I spent a few days designing the information architecture wires to m how a user would navigate from one part of the application to another. The following are the app wireframes I created post discussion with the developers.
Fince, a product for the 68.7% who struggle with financial decisions.
We reached out to participants who had expressed interest in beta- usability testing and tested our prototype.
Throughout the sessions, we observed user interactions, captured completion times, and noted moments of friction or confusion. The goal was to evaluate how effectively our app addressed the core problem and how intuitively users could complete key tasks. To do this, we designed a structured usability testing plan. By analyzing the collected data, we identified what worked well, where users struggled, and which areas required improvement, helping us refine the experience to better meet user needs.
What began as a simple research exploration soon evolved into a fully realized application as we uncovered its real-world potential.
Despite my prior experience with a Fintech product at Kristal.AI, navigating tasks like participant recruitment, conducting interviews, and translating insights into actionable outcomes was both challenging and rewarding. This project not only strengthened my user research and product validation skills but also reinforced the importance of persistence, collaboration, and user-centered decision-making in bringing an idea from concept to reality.
Harshveen’s Product Playbook