Juniper Financial, a financial start-up, asked IDEO to lead the design and development of an integrated financial service enterprise. IDEO helped them to define and establish a strategic plan, develop the optimal suite of offerings with a consistent service proposition, create interface concepts for the company's website, and identify an implementation schedule.

IDEO made the task of identifying Juniper's target customers as a first-order goal for the project. A team consisting of specialists in human factors, business factors, design strategy, and interaction and environments design conducted observations of bank users in people's homes as they paid bills, at banks and ATMs, and elsewhere. Participants in the user observations, varying widely in age, wealth, ethnicity, and geographical location, were asked to draw their money in an abstract exercise to understand attitudes that weredifficult to convey in words. The team was able to discern four groups based on their feelings about their finances. Users were termed Pathfinders, Dreamers, Organizers, and Onlookers based on both their day-to-day engagement with and their long-term attitudes toward their money. Onlookers were identified as those most closely aligned with Juniper's values and the most likely adopters of Juniper's proposed services. Also Onlookers' low daily engagement with their money and lack of clear long-term goals made them potentially ideal, loyal bank customers.

This user matrix helped to focus Juniper's brand value and provided a framework in which to map the competitive landscape, so that Juniper could differentiate itself in this market. IDEO developed storyboard scenarios and enterprise models to better communicate the customer experience. This work greatly informed the architecture of Juniper's website, for which IDEO delivered a web-ready front-end implementation. Our research not only enabled Juniper to internalize an understanding of some fundamental financial user types and their related behaviors and motivations, it also redirected Juniper's business strategy and service proposition.