Study on The Investment Habits of Women
The Challenge
Gendered financial inequality is a multi-faceted problem, that starts from as low as women having no access to financial opportunities or using a small range of financial services. For this case study, the focus was on how well women made their money work for them in regards to investments.
​
This research was a Capstone project for a Design course, where we had to do a study and then design a digital product that is geared towards solving Gendered Financial Inequality. I had worked with a partner who worked on the designs.
Objectives and Research Questions
The main objective of this study was to understand the ways women invest and what problems existed in their investment methods.
​
​
In line with the findings from the secondary research that was carried out, this research sets out to answer these questions:
-
Do women have access to investments?
-
Are women willing to invest their monies?
-
What are the things that hinder Nigerian women from doing investments?
-
What experience have women had with making investments?
Scope of the Project
1. Understand the reasons women invest or save
2. Discover the ways they invest or save
3. Learn what problems exist in their current investment and saving methods.
​
Role and Deliverables
I was theUX Researcher on the team and also worked on the designs of the final product
Deliverables for this project were:
1. A report with summaries and visualization of my analysis process and key findings from the study.
2. Prototype for the proposed designs of the product
Methodolgy
The first course of action was to conduct Secondary Research which was done by reading papers and previous studies on the investment habits of Nigerian women.
​
The findings from the secondary research led to the creation of the research questions which were attempted to be answered by conducting in-depth interviews.
The purpose of using in-depth interviews was
1. to have a better understanding of what women know about investing,
2. Learn what digital products are they aware of that can help them make better investment decisions.
3. To also learn and understand the feelings women have about investments.
Analysis and Synthesis
For this study, 4 women were interviewed for 30 minutes each. My interviews followed an interview guide which I had worked on in the overrall plan for the research.
​
Analysis for this project was done on Miro with an Affinity map, where common themes were categorised together as seen below:
​
Major Findings
The study revealed the following:
-
Older women are wary of investments and need strong referrals to participate in any form of investment.
-
Younger women are more willing to explore investment options but cannot seem to find where to make investments.
-
They all save, but rarely make any money on their savings.
-
There is a scarcity of satisfactory investment plans- either too long durations with very little returns or too many people investing in one thing.
The key take-away where women were worried about the validity of an investment platform if no one had used to before them, was a defining element in the overall design process where the designer chose to include a feature in the app that enabled users to know which of the people on their contacts also use the platform, and this would happen only if they gave certain permissions during the onboarding process.
Impact
The overall goal of this project was to design a digital product that could be used for investments
In the image below is a cross-section of an app that would solve this problem as well as the worry that the participants in this study had about getting strong referrals before the use of a product
A clickable Prototype is available here