Transforming financial education into play for increased engagement

As team lead, one of my responsibilities was spearheading the communication with the client. Usually it meant that I would speak on behalf of our team in client meetings, and email them at other times. It also meant translating words that mean differently to our team. When we kicked off our project, the client would often say our goal was to “redesign things” which de-emphasizes our relationship with improving the user experience. To steer away from that thought, I had to question if the goal was to prioritize the gamification aspect of the UX. The client then confirmed and further clarified that the goal was to increase user engagement through gamification features, giving our team the direction to provide meaning.

As team lead, I made sure that my teammates were in a position to implement a meaningful solution to the client without any roadblocks. For me this meant that I would project manage our team’s work by gathering resources from the client, organizing our work under a shared drive, outlining an agenda for internal meetings, scheduling meetings. compiling questions and notes for client meetings, collaborating under the same figma files, and keeping our team accountable to the timeline we set in our project plan. Doing this allowed my teammates to focus on improving the user experience and increase engagement through gamification features.

Compared to my teammates, I had more experience working in design throughout my career. This allowed me to offer design mentorship in areas where my teammates had less experience in such as the visual and UI aspects of the project. In some cases I would offer straightforward suggestions to improve the UI/UX but there were opportunities where I didn’t necessarily provide the answers to a problem. In these cases, I presented my feedback as questions to help my teammates think for themselves. For example, when it comes to designing the components for friendly challenges, I would ask, “How might we adjust the colors so that they are consistent with the overall palette while establishing hierarchy between ‘inviting friends’ and ‘your party’?” This style of leadership challenged my teammates to better understand the design as a system that factors in principles such as hierarchy, weight, spacing, contrast, etc.