Service Design (MA)
Yuchi Chu
Tina is a multidisciplinary service/experience designer, with the BSc in engineering and 2 years of user-facing consultancy experience. Combining the service design practice, she is passionate about shaping better user experience and delivering well for society. She works to build a strategic and innovative service which could balance stakeholder’s need and bring new opportunities for business. During the education at RCA, she has experienced several projects about different topics: private banking, innovative design, food market and startup. In her final year, she embraces the challenges to design a banking service for people with mental health problems.
This project came from the brief sponsored by Barclays from D&AD. My self-directed project in 2020 aims to explore how service design can help customers, who suffer from different degrees of mental health issues to better manage their money.
Through the process, I realized the interaction issue between vulnerable customers and banks, struggles between rationality and sensibility. I tried to redefine the solutions which could reduce the risk of financial detriment and also support their difficulties. The challenges in this project I faced are identifying the customers and service boundaries. During the lockdown, I have observed the behaviours of impulsive spending and interviewed key stakeholders. Putting myself into others shoes helped me to understand customer's circumstance and design new opportunities for banking service beyond a single format.
The new service is called Moneybuddy which implies that the high street bank could be a supportive partner in the customer's mental health journey.
Moneybuddy is a digital banking service integrated into the current banking app that allows customers to reorganise their financial priorities and activate new banking modes based on their moods and mental health circumstances.
Moneybuddy aims to improve financial health and reduce impulsive spending to avoid worsening both debt problems and mental health.
With the consideration of mental health journey, we design two modes called Soar mode and Nest mode. For people who are in the self-support stage, soar mode deliver beneficial activities to help customers better understanding their issues and taking early actions. For people who have taken professional mental health support, Nest mode support customers to easily control their spending and achieving their financial goal during taking mental health support sessions.
Moneybuddy could be a toolkit in the mental health support ecosystem that enable customers to tackle both money and mental health problems at the same time. The modes create new opportunities for typical banking interaction to support more customers in different scenarios.
Welcome to check more details about this project on RCA SD website ("link to external text")