Aimee
Aimee | UX Designer | Frontend Developer
A financial literacy game that builds money management skills through resilience-enhancing, play-based learning for teens.
Users had difficulty understanding key moments in the game due to a lack of clear indicators and contextual information. They couldn't easily tell when a round ended, financial terms were left undefined, and screen transitions felt clunky and frustrating.
Enhance educational clarity and gameplay flow by incorporating accessible definitions for key financial literacy terms and streamlining screen transitions — fostering an engaging experience that supports long-term financial learning and resilience among teens.
Thirty hours, three months, five people, and a live client. I worked alongside a design lead, two designers, and a usability tester, with weekly client check-ins keeping scope honest. We were the UX/UI design team; the build was never in our scope. The audience raised the bar further: our primary user is twelve years old, so every term and every screen had to survive a seventh-grade reading level.
"I want to save up for a gaming console, but I always spend my allowance too fast."
"I want my kids to be money smart, but explaining it in a simple way is hard."
Financial terms left users confused — plain language was needed throughout.
Limited explanations made financial literacy hard to understand and apply.
Text-heavy, passive content caused users to lose interest quickly.
I was brought on as the UX Researcher. I built the competitive audit from scratch and developed the personas the team designed against — Mateo and his mother, Jennifer. I recruited our usability study participants and ran the sessions, editing the study protocols Raymond drafted before they went in front of real users.
Research wasn't the only thing I touched. We all designed in the shared Figma file, and I contributed screens alongside the rest of the team.
I was second chair in the weekly client meetings and led them whenever our design lead couldn't attend. Partway through the project the team moved me from Researcher to Research Coordinator — the work I had drifted into was keeping five people pointed in the same direction, and the title caught up with it.
View Full Case Study →We delivered two things to the client: a redesign and the research findings behind it. The redesign added pop-up definitions for the financial terms, in-game tutorials, and a clear signal for the end of a round. When we tested those revised designs, comprehension of the gameplay mechanics improved and satisfaction ratings went up.
Near the end I realized the team hadn't worked with a design system before — components and sticker sheets were unfamiliar territory. So I built ours out and ran a short training to get everyone using it. They kept working that way after the project wrapped, which is the change I'm proudest of: it outlasted me.
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