MONBO
Monbo is a service that guides couples be their own marriage mentor when they meet financial issues. Monbo encourage people to use lightweight and self-diagnostic tools to understand each other’s consumption preference and conduct discussion in simulated spending situations. With the support of peers and experts, couples can find a comfortable place to share and learn.
Scope
Discovery
Define
Concept development
Value proposition
Prototyping
Validation
Business model
Market strategy
User testing
Partner
Marriage Consultant
Financial Consultant
My role
Research
Design Strategy
Business Plan
Market Analysis
UX/UI Design
Duration
2021 December -2022 June
CONTEXT
27% of married people indicate financial issues cause the most conflict in their home，and the main source of financial conflict was endorsed as Household expenses and personal spending. However, couples always don't know how to start a money talk or find a better way to reduce the conflict, especially when they are facing the most important economic relationship. These could leave a bad effect on their psychological, emotional well-being, and even became a major issue in the break down of their marriage.
Through our service, we hope to create a future where couples are more prepared to handle family financial issues and reduce the rate of failed marriages caused by financial issues.
RESEARCH METHOD
USER RESEARCH: Before we conduct user interview, we realised that it is a rather personal and sensitive topic to many couples, so we put some efforts to design the process. First, we use simple and neutral expressions to encourage them to share, and replace complex terminologies with some examples to help them understand. When the question is sensitive, we assume a scenario to reduce interviewee’s tension, and ease them with some stories from recent news or friends. Lastly, we interview couples separately, because some people tend to hide their true feelings when their spouses is around.
ACADEMIC RESEARCH: Meanwhile, we referred to Conflict Management Methods from 30 Literature study
and extracted Counselling Process from a senior marriage counsellor
WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
TARGET GROUP
NEWLYWEDS: THE MOST RELEVANT GROUP FOR FINANCIAL PROBLEMS
Newlyweds of Gen Y and Gen Z are the groups that are most relevant to the issue, for they are usually at the carefree stage, the passion for love may make them ignore or despise their financial problems, while it is exactly the period they may start to pool money and make many financial decisions together.
INSIGHTS
SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM
By collating the research data, we found that couples' main spending conflicts came in six areas: travel, relatives and friends, recreation, housing, daily transaction, etc. For the Most of these issues, couples inclined to resolve within themselves; while they still need expert advice on investment and legal issues. In addition, some people also expressed the need for some outside voice when they are trapped in dilemma, as well as a sense of belonging to know they’re not the only couple facing challenges.
So what we need to do is to help couples to be able to give them scientific and reliable guidance on how to solve problem internally, and build connection for them with experts and people with similar problems externally, when they facing the issues beyond their capabilities.
OPPORTUNITIES
How might we guide newlyweds understand others' consumption choices and build effective communication to reduce family conflict when they have different opinions about household expenses and personal spending
THE SOLUTION
Monbo provides couples with the same core steps as professional Counselling of Self-mentoring：
Assess issues, Discuss about the issues, Give suggestions, Develop communication and coping strategies
SERVICE OVERVIEW
The first stage is to arise awareness. users are invited to identify their own problems through an interesting cross-evaluation. (This is also a method of self-diagnosis.)
Our tool cards facilitate effective communication between couples who have poor cross-evaluation results. It allows users to become their own marriage counsellor and work together to resolve some communication difficulties.
The community is a way to support the users' emotions. It allows users to find groups to talk and understand that they are not alone and that it is normal to have these problems in a marriage.
And the last stage is to provide more professional help to couples who have severe family financial struggles, and these help are not only about communication, but also about the professional economic knowledge of family financial management.
STAKEHOLDERS
With MONBO, we are not only using tool cards to help couples with their financial communication problems. In addition, we will bring more experts from the marriage and financial industry to the platform. With the strength of the experts, we offer consultation and courses to our users. We will invite experts to collaborate on the design of the cards to provide users with the most professional communication tools and to make Monbo become a potential consulting toolkit for consultants.
In addition, the content of the cards will be constantly updated based on user feedback. Some of the best communication guidance from our users will be added to our library through expert approval, and keep providing users with the latest and best content.
An expanded marketing channel will be implemented, we will create an influence on social media, as well as sell tool cards offline in retail stores.
USER TESTING
In the design process，we conducted user testing with 13 users, two rounds of workshops and co-creation discussions. And we exchanged ideas with three designers working in the same field. Through those activities, we heard many different voices to help us improve our design for newlyweds
The majority of our users have confirmed our design， and are very positive about our service. they said it’s insightful, they can gain knowledge of partners reasonings. It helps transparency in the relationship. They believe that being able to engage both spouses is something that can really advance the financial communication。
Some users also expect to have more experts to talk about their problems. They look forward to see whether the partner understands them from the cross-evaluation. They also questioned our original game design, suggesting that couples might be distracted and thus focus on wins and losses rather than discussions.
WHAT WE HAVE ITERATED ON
WHAT IS VALUABLE IN OUR DESIGN
Therefore, based on user feedback, we iterated on the original design and changed the individual spending personality to a cross evaluation for couples. The value of this is to give users the motivation to discover potential problems.
We have simplified the original board game into question cards to make it easier to use and to allow users to use it anytime and anywhere, especially for some specific scenarios such as during picnic or travel.
Secondly, we are working more closely with experts to ensure the quality of the question cards and to bring more expertise to the users.
The last point is that we keep the community design, because users are eager to find other couples who are at the same stage to discuss and to inspire themselves.
MEASUREING INDICATOR
To better measure the success of our services. In quantitative terms. We will observe couple’s cross-evaluation scores to see if they have improved their understanding of each other through Monbo service. And we will analyse the Net promoter score and the The number of website visits, understand the customer's overall satisfaction and the customer 's loyalty.
From a qualitative perspective, we will use interviews and survey methods to understand what our users expect from us and whether our design is sustainable.
MARKET RESEARCH
By analysing our product alongside the market, we have found that there is no direct competitor. Most of the service are only aimed at the financial management or emotional counselling. The whole market is separating emotions from money. For example，although the consultor tried hard to confort couple and soften the financial conflit in an emotional way, their financial difficulties are still pending. When we look at couple game card design like “The and”. Although their questions stimulate communication between the couple, they are limited to enhancing the intimacy. More insightful family spending questions are somthing they didn’t tackle.
This is why we have created a service that is a fusion of sense & sensibility, helping couples to have a harmonious money talk with the guidance of professional tool cards
BUSINESS MODEL
The main source of profit for our services is from expert consultations. Users book consultations with financial and marriage counselling companies through our platform, and we will charge a commission for this. We also generate revenue by charging advertising fees, and selling tool cards.
For the main spending, it’s divided into marketing and payroll. We need to advertise a lot to increase the impact of the brand， and to attract more experts to join.
FUTURE DEVELOPMENT
In the future, we see loads of possibilities on Monbo, it could be a party game, family game or speed dating activities; or more professionally, it could become a pre-marital financial check-up like physical check-ups, or be a practical tool in marriage or financial counselling, which will bring us the chance to cooperate with the dating app, marriage company, bank, and even Children's Education Company.
Thanks for the team
