0 → 1 Product Discovery. On approaching vaguely defined design problems with no data
#69: I was judging week 7 submissions for the "Why before UI" design challenge
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0 → 1 Product Discovery. On approaching vaguely defined design problems with no data
I remember quite vividly when online design challenges became a thing. When I was still a junior designer, eight or nine years ago, I joined a couple of these with a lot of hope and energy. There was just one problem with them: they were heavily focused on the visual side of things.
Earlier this year, Miranda Slayter from UX Survival Guide invited me to join her secret project. I fell in love with the idea from the very start: it was meant to be a multiple-week challenge with experienced designers judging projects with a focus on strategy, not just pixels. Miranda invited several other great designers to help judge submissions, including Femke van Schoonhoven, Aneta Kmiecik, Nina Tahami, Karla Fernandes, Tom Prior, and Edward Sudjono. With a bit of help from beta testers, she picked the perfect name for the challenge: Why before UI.
My prompt for week 7 of the challenge, which finished just yesterday, was the most strategic as it could be. No pixels involved at all, since this was a whiteboard challenge. The scenario went something along those lines:
You walk into a big-tech interview and hear the classic prompt above. Nothing else is provided: no personas, no data, no mock-ups.
The purpose of this exercise is not to produce polished UI on the spot, but to show that you can frame the problem, surface knowledge gaps, and plan discovery before drawing screens.
For this week’s challenge you’ll simulate that moment.
“Design a financial app for kids.”
In today’s article, I’m covering how I’d approach such a challenge. At the end, you’ll find some universal takeaways for working out uncommonly ambiguous tasks like this one in a corporate environment, not just from the lens of a whiteboard challenge one may get during a job interview.
Getting started
A challenge like this one can be frightening. You start with a blank sheet of paper. No requirements, no goals, no data. The ambiguity of such a project is the highest you can imagine. But with the right approach, it shouldn’t overwhelm you – just take a deep breath and try looking at it from a helicopter view. No one sane would expect that you’ll be delivering here any mockups or prototypes, but rather a plan. We’ll try to come up with a high-level plan for gathering more data and reducing the level of ambiguity.
Small steps method
We will follow The Small Steps Method, which is basically slicing this monstrosity of a task into smaller, manageable (and not so scary!) chunks of work – a discovery for a real project like this would take weeks before a designer would touch Figma and put the first pixel on a canvas.
We need to think about what we don’t know today, what’s most important to learn in the first place, and how we might gather this knowledge. Hopefully, this data will unlock new doors and help us move the needle.
Setting constraints
Because it’s an open design challenge for everyone rather than a whiteboard exercise typically seen during job interviews, there are no constraints set. The brief is super simple: “Design a financial app for kids.” We have to extend it a little by setting a scene.
Because every market has its own regulators and rules when it comes to finance, we need to narrow our brief down. Since I live in Poland, I’m picking this market as my constraint.
The second constraint is the business context. Who’s asking us to do the discovery work – is it a startup or an already established institution, such as a bank, which is trying to create a new offering? For this particular exercise, let’s pick a bank.
Initial questions
In this very first step of the exercise, I’ll try to list out everything that I don’t know. This will later inform my research plan and hopefully help move the needle. At this stage, it’s important not to make too many assumptions and to stay open-minded. It’s better to go super broad with the questions and eventually trim the list down to the most important ones. I’m splitting my questions into four themes: Monetization and Brand Positioning, Regulatory, Competitive, and Viability.
Monetization and brand positioning questions
These questions will help set the brand positioning of the offering and validate ideas for monetization.
What tone of voice (serious & safe vs. playful & gamified) is appropriate without diluting trust?
How can we monetize this product? Would parents pay a small subscription fee for premium features, e.g., an educational module?
Do parents see the bank as a trusted partner in their child’s financial education?
Can this increase family loyalty, e.g., parents consolidate accounts with our bank?
How many users do we need for break-even?
From the stakeholders’ perspective, what is the ultimate purpose of building this app? Is it a long-term game of building a relationship with the brand at a young age and eventually converting them into adult customers?
Regulatory questions
These questions should help me understand the rules and regulations set by authorities for finance apps and services in my market.
What are the advertising and monetization restrictions for minors in Poland/EU?
What are the age-based restrictions to be a primary user of a banking system or to have a joint children’s account with the parent’s account?
How to approach GDPR & Polish/EU rules on children’s data collection and parental consent?
What’s the right age for children to start educating them about finance?
What risks (fraud, misuse, reputational) must be mitigated?
Competitive landscape questions
This subset of questions will help me understand what other players in the market are doing in this area.
How are other banks and fintech apps already approaching this opportunity? Do they position themselves more as financial education tools or as spending/payment enablers?
How do competitors segment their audience (age, parental involvement, digital natives vs. younger kids)?
What’s the main attractor for minors in adjacent contexts, e.g., mobile gaming, online gaming, and what can be borrowed from there to a banking app?
Viability questions
These questions are designed to uncover whether the project is worth building from the business POV.
What transaction limits (e.g., spending caps, parental approvals) are feasible?
Do we have the technical infrastructure to support child-specific profiles or sub-accounts?
How easily can this product integrate with existing banking products?
Does this initiative support long-term customer lifetime value (e.g., onboarding future adult customers)?
Research plan
Once I establish what questions I want to uncover and what data is needed to move the needle, I need to create a research plan. I’ll go super lean and just stick to assigning research methods to four main themes. At this stage, I’m not going to come up with a full plan, commit to any timeline, or list out potential risks. In a corporate environment, it of course would be required, but for a whiteboard challenge, this should do the trick.
Monetization and brand positioning
IDIs or surveys on willingness to pay.
Usability tests of freemium prototypes to uncover perception of premium features.
Financial analysis/modeling with the finance team to check what’s the break-even.
Benchmarking on hooks for children, pain points solved for parents, and tone of voice.
Stakeholder interviews or workshops on goals.
Focus group with parents on brand perception, trust, and loyalty.
Regulatory
Desk research into GDPR and KNF (Polish Financial Supervision Authority) guidelines.
Expert consultation with the compliance/legal team.
Competitive
Benchmark apps from fintechs and local banks.
Benchmark apps from banks in the EU.
Look at adjacent apps parents and children trust (Duolingo, Roblox, educational platforms).
Identify unmet needs (e.g., parental trust, safe social features, gamification) with IDIs and focus groups.
Viability
Diary studies with parents and kids about current money habits.
Fake-door tests to measure sign-up interest.
Expert consultation with stakeholders managing adjacent offerings and tech leads on the infra side of things.
Stakeholder interviews or workshops on goals.
Success metrics
The success metric will tell me if discovery and later product design are on track. As you can see, I have avoided assigning numerical goals that the product team would try to hit in the future once the product is released. It’s way too early to tell what exactly is going to be released and come up with KPIs that make sense.
Parent sign-up conversion rate (from awareness → download → account setup).
Children/parents engagement (weekly active use).
Retention after 3–6 months.
Net Promoter Score for parents.
Usability score (or fun score) for children.
Universal tips
Whenever you are facing a whiteboard challenge like this one during a job interview, or a real problem in a corporate environment, when your boss asks you to explore new market opportunities, there are a couple of things to keep in mind to stay sane during the project:
Don’t assume too much in projects like this one. This brief is one big unknown – when you think about a scale of ambiguity, this is at the end of it. What’s more important is actually to think about what you don’t know and what you need to learn to move the needle.
Use the small steps method. Don’t try to uncover everything at once; it’s impossible. Be realistic with your research plan and don’t try to please stakeholders by saying you can have all the data within two weeks.
Success criteria in this phase are tricky. Avoid setting any numerical goals, like hitting 70% of something within the first month after release, when you don’t have an idea what (and when) you’re actually going to release.
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Mateusz’s LinkedIn
So many great tips in here for designers tackling these types of challenges. Really happy to have you as the judge for this one. I know the challengers valued your tips 🙌