The Knot

The brief

The Knot is best known as a wedding planner. Their growth question: what's beyond the wedding? Engaged and newly-wed couples often obsess over planning a single event, then have nowhere to channel that planning energy after they say "I do." Knot wanted to know whether a brand built on weddings could earn the right to live alongside couples once the wedding is over — specifically in the domain of family financial planning.

I was asked to study the consumer, the category, and the brand. The research was meant to surface how a financially-deliberate couple thinks about money individually, blends it during a wedding, and manages it together afterward — and what role a brand like Knot could plausibly play in that arc.

Meet Azka

Azka is in her late 20s. She's recently married to Seemab, an MBA student. She lives in Evanston, in an apartment that — as I noticed the moment I walked in — is almost spartan. No shoe rack. Minimal decoration. And yet the place feels alive: cakes cooling on the counter, the smell of fresh cooking, two photo albums waiting on the coffee table for me to look through.

She agreed to the interview within hours of being approached. When I asked about her finances, she pulled up a spreadsheet on her laptop and showed me actual numbers. Not a redacted version, not a sanitized summary — the whole thing. That openness set the tone for the rest of the afternoon.

Finding a personal connection

The course asked us to map a subculture we belong to against the customer's. The exercise was uncomfortable in the best way — it forced me to notice my own assumptions about people who track finances rigorously.

I'm a budget watch collector. I love watches that cost a tenth of what "real" watch enthusiasts spend, and I love them precisely because they let me participate in something I care about without paying the price of admission a snobbier version of the hobby would charge. On a recent trip to Dubai, I spent two days in the mall not at Patek Philippe or A. Lange & Söhne, but tracking down a plastic Swatch version of the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms — a watch that meets the exacting design language of a $13,000 timepiece for less than 1% of the cost. It's now one of my favorites.

What that subculture taught me: there's a particular kind of creativity that hides inside frugality. Finding the cheap-but-soulful object isn't compromise — it's craft. And before this interview, I was carrying around an assumption that financially deliberate people were doing it to feel superior. Azka showed me they're often doing it for the same reason I'm collecting cheap watches: to be in the world without letting price tags decide who gets to participate.

That reframe was the hinge of the whole project. It changed what I thought The Knot could offer — not a more powerful budget tracker, but a tool that respects the creativity already at work in how couples like Azka and Seemab plan their lives.

What I'd carry into the next interview

My discussion guide was conservative. I was so worried about keeping the focus on Azka that I avoided asking about Seemab — and Azka kept bringing him up anyway. The richest material in the whole interview was about her perception of his decision-making. Next time: ask about the partner directly, even when the subject is a single person.

I learned that the artifacts on a customer's coffee table are not decoration. The two photo albums and the Excel sheet were the interview. Once Azka started narrating them I stopped following my guide and just asked about what she was pointing at. That was the right move; I should be braver about it sooner.

And the introspection step — comparing my watch hobby to her frugality — ended up being the most useful tool in the whole framework. I'd use it on every project I do from now on. Designing for someone without first noticing how you're already projecting onto them is, I think, where most user research goes quietly wrong.