InvestiGators
A Mafia x Poker game about investment!
Overview
In a month-long 0 to 1 sprint during the Master of Human-Computer Interaction + Design program at the University of Washington, myself and 4 other students built a high-fidelity, fully functional social card game that helps young adults reduce stigma around talking about money and build communal knowledge over institutional knowledge around investing.
The Problem Space
Through rounds of desk research, competitive analyses, a survey, and interviews, we discovered two main pain points in the investing landscape for young adults:
“I don’t trust these institutions, they just pretend to be helpful.”
“I avoid talking about money as much as possible...it’s uncomfortable...”
We discovered that these pain points resulted from a wicked problem in the investing ecosystem whose roots lead to classism, capitalism, generational wealth, and segregation.
As a result, I proposed that the most meaningful point of interference is at a social level and affect our users from an educational, communal, and stigma-reducing perspective.
My Contributions
Working closely with my team and advisors, I focused on:
Product decisions: Drove game design and development, guided synthesis of ideation to fit the scope and constraints of the project.
Physical Development: Led the design and execution of all physical touch points of the product.
a. Created game cards and instructions
b. Designed custom 3D printed tokens
c. Designed and built custom game box and packaging
Brand Identity: Built the logo, brand guide, and enforced the visual identity across all product touch points.
Result
InvestiGators is a social card game that contains:
30 Scenario Cards about research-backed investment scenarios. Includes terminology and real life examples.
5 Character Cards of relatable, young adult gators backed by research into the target audience.
5 Role Cards
50 Tokens
An Instructions pamphlet
A custom game box
Process
At the onset of the project, my team and I brainstormed possible topics and problem spaces to explore.
We narrowed our divergent ideas down to "How might we help young adults be more proactive in investing?" through a vote, which was an idea that I pitched.
We then each conducted desk research to gain a deeper understanding of the problem space, as well as search for opportunities and gaps in the ecosystem.
My portion of the desk research.
We then converged again to synthesize our findings into a problem statement:
Young adults (18-35) are overwhelmed by the complexity and noise of the investment landscape, preventing them from confidently taking the first step. The absence of trusted, personalized guidance results in significant investment delays, causing them to lose out on valuable early-career wealth growth opportunities.
Our group then conducted 15 surveys and 5 interviews to gain first-hand knowledge of our target user group.
We mapped our interview findings in an empathy map to begin pattern-finding, as well as created a persona for our target user group.
We then dove into an expanse of ideations for potential solutions.
In order to narrow down our solution, we tried validating our most promising ideas through many different lenses for considerations such as feasibility, effectiveness and long-term impacts.
We discovered that only one of our solutions was able to address the main concerns around trust and stigma in an effective way that had potential to make meaningful impact within the time constraints of our sprint: a lighthearted social game that allows for educational discourse.
From there, I quickly mocked up a game that could address the needs of our users.
My "napkin sketch" of the idea.
I led the development of the game and created an MVP with my teammates to begin user testing.
First user test
Second user test
I created the logo and brand guide, as well as the graphic design for all touch points of the game.
InvestiGators at the MHCID Fall 2025 Showcase
Reflections
This was one of the few passion projects I've done since starting my career as a product designer. It felt extremely refreshing to jump back into research, ideating, and building in a scrappy, passion-driven way. The constraints for this project were very different from one with real-world stakes, and allowed me to dream wilder and try more experimental approaches, which actually produced an extremely successful and immersive product!
