A Decision-Driven Methodology for Business Intelligence Dashboards in Start-Ups; Tailoring Mobile Banking Products to Women in Tanzania: Why Northern Tanzanian Women’s Needs are Unaccounted for

Both my technical project and my STS research sit at the intersection of financial technology, user needs, and start-ups. While my technical project focuses on meeting a financial technology start-up’s business reporting needs, my STS research project explores how female entrepreneurs’ needs are unaccounted for in the implementation of mobile banking services. At the beginning of my technical project, I invested a substantial amount of time in learning about the lending industry and financial technology services more broadly. As I was doing this research, I came across several research articles documenting the staggering finance gap between male- and female-owned businesses, which is only exacerbated for smaller enterprises. This spurred my interest in taking on a research project characterized by the gender finance gap. Additionally, the start-up I worked with in my technical project has a commitment to servicing customers across the credit spectrum, and this aspect of accessibility aligns closely with my interests in gender equity and designing for all users, not just those who are considered the standard.

Partnering with a young start-up in the financial technology sector, my team worked to create meaningful data dashboards to help inform critical business decisions. Businesses, especially start-ups, rely on data-driven metrics to help guide their decisions and effectively achieve their mission. For this technical project, we implemented a four-phase dashboard methodology process that involved developing a strong understanding of the business context, eliciting business needs and data requirements from key stakeholders, identifying decision-driven metrics, and iteratively implementing the dashboards with the chosen software. Our team applied these four phases to a financial technology start-up specializing in home improvement loans. Application of this methodology revealed the importance of pivoting quickly from paper prototypes to end-software prototypes, establishing direct traceability between each business decision and dashboard element, and iterating frequently between stakeholder engagement, dashboard development, and testing.

Alongside the rise of financial technology, organizations such as the World Bank are piloting the use of digital financial tools to alleviate the finance gap faced by women-led small businesses. This gender finance gap is heightened in countries with worse overall gender equality and lower government effectiveness such as Tanzania. In 2016, the World Bank led the Business Women Connect program in northern Tanzania, which equipped women entrepreneurs with business training and access to M-Pawa, a mobile banking product. My STS research paper first explores the specific needs of the women in the Business Women Connect program through a literature review of women's lifestyles in Tanzania. It then leverages Judy Wajcman's gender-aware Social Construction of Technology framework to understand why these needs were not met. While the Business Women Connect program succeeds in accounting for some of the women's needs in the areas of social norms and business climate characteristics, it falls short of meeting other needs in these areas and meets no technology access needs. My research paper finds that these women’s experiences are not fully accounted for due to standardization centered around men’s needs, unanticipated uses of the mobile banking technology, and pervasive gender inequities across Tanzania.

My STS research paper and technical project have enabled me to explore one of my favorite parts of the systems engineering curriculum: the focus on user needs, which is a central part of human-centered design. We are taught how to engage with stakeholders, identify their needs, and effectively implement those needs into our final designs. In my technical project, I met weekly with stakeholders from the company my team was working with, and we learned about their business roles, daily business decisions they have to make, and aesthetic preferences. We used this to inform exactly what information we portrayed on the data dashboards as well as how we portrayed it. Simultaneously, in my STS research, I pored over literature, interviews, and surveys to develop a strong understanding of women’s lifestyles in northern Tanzania. I created a set of needs driven by what I had learned, which I then used to evaluate the effectiveness of the Business Women Connect program in meeting the needs of the female entrepreneurs. Executing both of these needs-driven projects enabled me to learn how to study and understand stakeholder needs using multiple mediums. In my technical project, I developed an understanding of user needs through direct interaction and observation while my STS research was more removed with eliciting needs from secondary documents. My work on each project separately helped me to better pursue and understand the foundational motivation behind both projects: to learn how to engage more meaningfully in human-centered design. Both projects strengthened my ability to understand a user and build technologies that are optimized to their specific needs and lifestyles. I have learned the importance of understanding the nuances between users who may seem similar on paper but whose less visible experiences lend themselves to differing needs and uses for a given technology. I have also grown to appreciate even more the significance of having each design decision be driven by concrete needs. These experiences position me to be a human-centered engineer who leads with empathy and designs for the benefit of all users.

School of Engineering and Applied Science

Bachelor of Science in Systems Engineering

Technical Advisor: Reid Bailey

STS Advisors: MC Forelle and Rider Foley

Technical Team Members: Madison Gallagher, Adeline Pratt, Jenna Tuohy