The Oregon Treasury Savings Network oversees the Oregon College Savings Plan, OregonSaves, Oregon ABLE, and related programs that give the public access to savings options for college, retirement, and personal goals, including for those without access to a traditional 401k. OTSN wanted to explore whether adding gamified financial literacy content to their app, alongside everyday tasks like checking balances or contribution rates, would provide real value to users. As part of an agency team, I helped lead the research to answer that question, and to help chart a realistic path forward if the answer was yes.
client
Oregon Tresury Savings Network
year
2025
timeframe
Three Months
UX Research
UX Strategy
Mobile App
Problem statement
OTSN's existing platform was limited to basic account functions. Users could check their balances, but couldn't adjust their contribution rate without calling in, and gifting to someone's account required paperwork rather than a simple digital flow. The platform, built on the Vestwell financial system, also offered no financial literacy content or planning tools, such as the ability to model how increasing contributions by a certain percentage might affect savings over time. This left OTSN with limited ability to help families understand or grow their savings, and no way to determine whether users actually wanted more financial education built into the product they already used.
Solution
To answer that question, I helped lead a statewide survey distributed across several Oregon savings program participant lists, including the Oregon Values and Belief Center, the Oregon College Savings Plan, OregonSaves, and Oregon ABLE. The survey reached 19,320 total participants and received 1,661 responses, an overall response rate of 8.6 percent. Results overwhelmingly indicated that users wanted financial literacy content, and that receiving it within the app, alongside their existing savings tasks, felt like the right context for that information. Alongside the survey, I helped conduct stakeholder interviews and a competitive analysis, identifying established content providers who could supply financially accurate, brandable literacy content rather than requiring OTSN to build that expertise from scratch. Our research also included working directly with Vestwell, the platform's underlying financial system, to understand the technical lift required to support this kind of feature. I brought these findings together into a clear recommendation for the client: there was genuine user demand for this feature, and a viable path to sourcing credible content to support it.
Outcome
The project ultimately paused after it became clear that Vestwell would not provide the API access needed to connect account data to any new literacy features. While implementation is on hold pending a resolution to that access barrier, the research delivered real value on its own, giving OTSN clear, validated direction and a documented understanding of both the opportunity and the constraint standing in its way.
