Who Is Your Financial Alter Ego?

Not everyone is inherently drawn to financial history.

How might we encourage a younger demographic to resonate with and actively learn about historic women of finance through interactive displays and activities?

Gen Alpha visitors have never known a museum without a screen. That meant designing around three things:

We pitched three directions before landing on a quiz.

Alongside the quiz, we explored an immersive digital timeline (parallel walls contrasting historical context with an individual woman's personal story) and a "day in the life" desk station where visitors interacted with period-specific objects directly. Both taught about these women. The quiz was the only concept that put the visitor inside an identity built from their own choices, which is what made it worth building out fully.

I led the prototyping while one of my teammates focused on the visual language. The final system paired a finance related animal avatar (how a visitor navigates the experience) with a separately-assigned financial archetype, built on the DISC model of human behavior, tied to two real historical women per archetype. Visitors then got specific, real people whose documented approach matches the trait they were assigned.

Designing beyond the screen

The quiz itself runs through a short series of scenario-based questions, interspersed with brief historical facts, plus a 15-second speed round where visitors choose two items to carry on their "financial journey". It's a fast, instinct-driven decision that mirrors the pressure these women actually operated under.

Where the design earns its keep is after the result: visitors are directed to find their archetype's exhibits in the physical museum, scan a QR code at each, and unlock a customization piece for a digital character card they can keep and share. This is built to route attention back into the rest of the museum.

The whole system also had to hold up across three different physical formats — a phone, a wall-mounted touchscreen, and a standalone kiosk — each with different accessibility standards and input methods running the same underlying logic.

Our project concluded with a final presentation at Fidelity's Boston office. I'm happy to chat more in depth about the process or final prototypes over a call!

Reach out to me at: yangjuliac@gmail.com