Education – Somia Customer Experience

Conducted in collaboration with Women’s World Banking, this study explores the financial behaviors and challenges of urban Indonesian young adults aged 18–25. It also examines existing university financial literacy programs to identify more effective interventions that can drive behavioral change.

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The Impact

From the research, three phenomenon that influence young adults financial behaviors are identified:

Impulsive and consumptive buying: Social pressure and a “money is always available” mindset lead to impulsive spending, preventing young adults from building savings or emergency funds. For instance, we heard a story about the student organization leader who felt obligated to pay for everyone in a meeting held in a café.

Overestimating loan repayment capacity: The easily accessible online loans, non-transparent terms, and a poor understanding of risk causes young adults to overestimate their repayment capacity and fall into damaging debt cycles.

Hesitancy and instant-return mindset in investing: A combination of fearing investment fraud and desiring immediate gains makes young adults reluctant to engage with investment products.

Based on these findings, we facilitated workshops with key stakeholders to build collective awareness around the real-world financial challenges young people face. These sessions empower stakeholders to be active problem-solvers, reducing the gap between high-level strategies and on-the-ground implementation.

Our Approach

The research used a mixed-method approach, qualitative and quantitative methods, where we conducted primarily qualitative research followed by quantitative research conducted by the UniTrend – Institute for Policy Development team. The qualitative fieldwork was conducted in three cities Bandung, Surabaya, and Kendari to represent western, central, and eastern Indonesia. These cities were selected based on strong performance in financial inclusion and literacy indicators to help surface best practices. For the targeted young adults, we talked with diverse experiences in financial product use, challenges, and exposure to literacy programs to better understand their behaviors and pain points.

Focus group Discussion with students to understand current financial literacy needs and existing programs

Example of money management tool used by young adults

Our Journey and Process

Preliminary Research

We began by mapping stakeholders and understanding the current financial literacy landscape. This included desk research and initial in-depth interviews (IDIs) with young adults, university lecturers, and financial literacy influencers.

We also conducted preliminary workshops with stakeholders, such as the government agencies, universities, and Financial Service Providers (FSPs) to define the problem space and frame key hypotheses.

Qualitative Research

In the main fieldwork phase, we used two qualitative methods to gather rich contextual insights:

Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) with University Students
We conducted FGDs with two groups of students: those who organize and manage financial literacy programs on campus, and those who participate in them. This allowed us to compare perspectives from both sides, capturing how programs are designed, delivered, and received.
In-depth Interviews (IDIs)
We spoke with a wide range of stakeholders, including financial institutions and service providers to explore program design, execution challenges, and unmet needs; university leadership and academics to understand how financial literacy is (or isn’t) embedded institutionally; and students from diverse genders, socioeconomic backgrounds, product usage, and living arrangements to gain deeper insight into their financial behaviors and challenges.

Synthesis & Co-creation

Insights from fieldwork revealed key behavioral patterns, unmet needs, and disconnects between existing financial literacy programs and youth realities.

The key findings are revealing gaps in the current program reach, format, content and outcome measurement.

From exclusive to inclusive: Expanding access across campus
Current programs in universities are centered around Faculties of Economics and Business, creating big gaps for students from other academic backgrounds.
Format & content: From one-off seminars to continuous, learner-centered programs
Continuous and practical knowledge in a program is rare as programs often push generic information or brand awareness.
Measuring behavioral outcomes: From participation counts to behavior change
Often evaluated using the number of participants reached or accounts opened, current programs are missing indicators to capture young adults behavioral change and skills development.

These findings became the foundation for co-creation workshops involving government agencies, financial regulators, FIs/FSPs, university representatives, and industry associations. Together, we developed possible interventions to close the gaps.

The Results

The research identified critical financial behaviors and mindsets among young adults, along with gaps in current literacy programs. These insights informed potential interventions that we identify and recommend for policymakers, universities, and financial institutions to better align their efforts with youth needs.

Consultant in-charge

Dono Firman

Project Oversee

Anindya Fitriyanti

Project Lead

Daniel Fandra

Research Ops

Chin Chin Burkolter

Project Oversee

Bhagaskara Setiawan

User Researcher

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Our design approach for Kemdikbudristek website transformations

The transformations of the education system conducted by the Indonesian Ministry of Education (Kemdikbudristek) prioritize fast and accessible information dissemination. In response, the ministry wants us to help them adjust their main website portal so that it can be easily accessed by any stakeholder under their service.

The Impact

With the new directions, we treated the website as the main lobby. Providing its users with essential information and then guiding them to other detailed sources provided by the main department under Kemdikbudristek. The result is an information architecture with a concise and modular information structure that is still adaptable to accommodate future changes.

Our Approach

First, we need to gain buy-in from all involved stakeholders, including the main departments of the ministry. We began the project by understanding the main agendas of each department, the way they disseminate information, and the current information provided on the main website. Since the main goal is to make the website accessible to its users, we also conducted several FGDs (focus group discussions) to validate our findings and explore the needs and behavior of users seeking education-related information.

It is not easy to fulfill the needs of every stakeholder, especially with tight deadlines. Therefore, we decided to design around 20% of the information that is important for the remaining 80% of users while still providing room for future growth and development.

Our Journey and Process

Internal Context Gathering

We conducted this activity through an internal workshop with the 9 main departments of Kemdikbudristek. In addition, we gathered context by inventorying the information presented on the website to determine the type of content and the responsible department.

External Context Gathering

We spoke with our users through two FGD (focus group discussion) sessions. The first session used an exploratory approach to gather user preferences while seeking information and determine what information is essential to them. The second session used a generative approach to gather more ideas for our interaction patterns and information architecture concept.

Information Architecture Design

During the FGD sessions, we identified the design directions we will follow throughout the project. We will design our information architecture with the mindset of a lobby since each main department has established its information channel. We will provide essential information on our website and easily guide users to the correct places.

Wireframing Process

As our users can access the Kemdikbudristek website from various sources, consistency and familiarity were important considerations when designing website interactions. To achieve this, we deliberately limited the number of interaction patterns and created a specific grid system so that users could easily understand where certain functions would be located. Additionally, we avoided using pop-up based interactions as they can harm the analytics performance.

Design Handover

We understand that no matter how well we design the website, it still needs to be supported by good-quality content. From the choice of images to the content tagging, these will affect our users’ experience while looking for information. To address this, we provided our clients with documentation in the form of a project brief, which serves as a guide for them while managing their content.

Information Architecture and Wireframe as our deliverables

The Results

We redesigned the website’s information architecture and managed to simplify its current content. The new design is concise and modular, fits with user behavior, and is flexible to any future changes. Here are some interesting findings about our users that influenced the decisions we made.

Our users perceive the website as a valid source of information, but they do not use it as their main source. Instead of seeking information through websites, they rely on social media or internal channels such as WhatsApp groups. When there is a need for fact-checking, the website becomes their top choice.
Users’ preferences in grouping existing information depend on their intensity and intent while accessing it. For example, users who need to access a specific service prefer a more personalized structure so they can easily position themselves.