NoMoreScams

Research and Analysis

In 2022, Australians lost a collective $3.1 Billion to scams, an 80% increase from 2021. The true cost of scams, however, is much greater than the is figure due to the emotional distress caused to victims.

To better understand this problem on an individual level, 7 individuals were interviewed. Following are some quotes from interviewees:

"It is hard to tell if something is a scam or not"

"It is scary that you don't even know if you're a victim till it's too late"

Interview transcripts were reviewed in conjunction with secondary sources and yielded the following insights:

1. Identification of scams reduces victimization rates.

2. People feel empowered when they have steps they can follow to help them identify scams.

3. It is difficult for people to identify scams due to their similarity to legitimate communications.

Persona

ACCC data indicates that the targeting of scams tends to be agnostic of demographics.

The Australian Community Attitudes to Privacy Survey (2023) indicates contrary to popular belief, individuals over the age of 55 are more likely to take precautions against scams than those under the age of 35. The survey also found males to be less likely to check for scams.

Colin is a 20 year old university student who has been reading a lot about people who have fallen victim to scams. He is worried that he or someone he cares about could fall victim to a scam by clicking on the wrong link or submitting the wrong form. Even though he considers himself pretty tech-savvy, he can't keep up with all the scams, especially when they look like legitimate texts.

Frustrations:

1) It is difficult to discern scam messages from legitimate messages.

2) Worrying about scams is mentally taxing.

Wants:

1) Wants to be able to learn about scams

2) Wants to be able to quickly identify scams

3) Wants a simple experience that he can share with his family and friends.

Definition and Ideation

The lotus blossom method was used to identify more specific problems that could be addressed. This yielded the following results:

• A lack of knowledge about the different types of scams.

• The inabilaty to identify fraudulent communications.

• Individuals don't know if their inforamtion has been compromised.

Further ideation yielded many solutions to these problems. The feasability of these solutions was tested to hone in on the following final set of features:

• Scam Analyser: Analyses text-based messages for scams

• "Is this a scam" Checklist: a simple yes/no checklist to help user identify a scam.

• Account safety checker: check if an account associated with a given email account has been part of a data leak.

• Static content to educate users on scams.

These features were used in creating a user journey map.

Lo-Fi Designs

Given the rapid development time and the modest amount of features, a reativly flat information architecture was chosen with features accessible from the home page.

All Lo-Fi designing took place within workshop sessions on a whiteboards to allow for realtime collaboration, critiques from mentors, and to give the developers a headstart on creating the basic structure of the website.

Final Designs

For the final design, a minimal, Swiss-inspired design style was chosen in order to greatly simplify front-end development process and to enable rapid iteration.

What this project taught me

Understand the KPI's

At the beginning of the project, I was worried about my lack of UI/UX design skills. I overcompensated by making initial high fidelity designs that were "a bit much" according to the team's mentor. He told me that this was not a UI/UX project, but a business analysis project. Thus the extent of the UI/UX was to be usable.

The team's inexperience with front-end development also meant that any superfluous UI decisions would only take time away from feature implementation.

Always be on your feet.

Two weeks into the project, one of the developers on the team had to drop out due to a family emergency. This meant that initial project plan did not apply anymore. The team was able to prepare an contingency plan and the delivery dates were not impacted by this change.

Another crisis was one of the databases being used for the features was taken closed source during development, requiring the team to create our own database of data leaks. This pushed the associated feature to the third iteration and the feature that was supposed to be delivered for iteration three was brought forward to iteration two.

Don't know something? Learn it.

At the beginning of this project, I had no experience with UI/UX design or front end design. The beginning of project required me deliver a UI/UX design and so I had to learn the fundmentels of UI/UX design as well as Figma in order to produce the deliverables.

I also picked up enough HTML and CSS to create some front-end elements after one of the developers had to drop out. This was a skill I learned over the course of the project. This gave me an insight into how a given UI element may be implemented and made me more cognisant of not adding any more complexity than was needed to the UI and the project as a whole.