SAAS FINANCE

Saving Acorns

Designed a smart budget tracking and journal solution for kids.

App Design

The problem

Traditional methods, such as piggy banks often fall short to provide kids with a deeper understanding of budgeting. 31% of parents don't have money conversations with their kids*. To address this issue, I designed a budgeting app for kids, using simple and joyful interactions to explain abstract financial concepts. This app aimed to make learning about money fun, no matter your age.

*Extracted from a survey by CNBC

Task

Building design system
Lead and conduct user research
Prototype, wireframing and user testing
UX analysis and facilitating the design thinking process
Web applications development

Tools

figma

illustrator

Google forms

Marvel app

miro

maze

Project Goals

I wanted the app to be a widely accessible tool that parents can use to teach kids about money management.

Allow kids to track, analyze, and manage their allowance and savings effectively.
Provide parents supervisory controls with insightful data to guide their children's financial education.
Create delightful interactions and simple elements to make financial literacy engaging.
Cater to a wide diversity, from educators, parents, to children, by practising inclusive design.

The Process

Understanding target users, problems, possible solutions and opportunities for improvement:

research process

Informed consent

Ensuring user interviews with children are ethically compliant:

Google forms

defining the problem

In this phase I focused to dig deeper to identify the pain points.

Jamie is a 14-year-old who wants to save money for a new bicycle. He feels that managing his allowance is confusing and overwhelming. Keeping track of his spending and savings might help, but it's time-consuming and hard to understand. Jamie needs a visual way to track his money to better manage it. It will give him a clear understanding of his financial habits in a way that both he and his parents understand. And he will also need a monthly visual report that his parents can use to help him stay on track.

Users didn't have a meaningful way to journal their overspending.
Users can't properly communicate with their parents regarding the characteristic challenges of their spending habits, what triggers over spending, saving goals, how long to save, etc.
Users don't have a good technical solution that can help them to document their spending habits.
Users can’t actually remember to record their spendings in a diary.

discover

For my preferred research methods, I used remote user interviews and user personas.

1. USER INTERVIEW

We formatted our user interviews sessions with 4 categories of questions:

About the user: Mostly about their daily habits, personal preferences, and how they use technology.
General product questions: Open-ended questions about their money management habits. "What is your ideal way to save money?"
Specific features: "Would you be interested in a feature that lets you set savings goals, track spending, or earn rewards?"
Discussions: We want to understand the child's general ideas about a budgeting solution, their expectations, and what they find engaging.

GOOGLE forms results for qual data analysis

2. USER PERSONA

Children preferred visual and interactive experiences over text-heavy content and parents valued safety features like spending limits and supervision.
With the data gathered from previous research, we started to generate provisional personas using statistical knowledge. These personas will help us to fine-tune our design for target users.

USER personas on miro

Empathy map that explores how children respond in a money saving space

discovering the user

As an indecisive student, I want readily available recourses so I can confidently make spending choices.

IDEATION

Using findings from the research, we settled on a set of core features:

Saving goals with visual trackers for children to set and monitor financial goals.
Open-ended questions about their money management habits. "What is your ideal way to save money?"
A library of educational tips and lessons on financial concepts broken down for easy understanding.
A parent dashboard where parents can approve spending and view progress.

coming up with solutions

Sketching and prototyping the proposed solution

With research data in hand, we decided to build the prototypes. As we iterate with the design thinking process, we build different prototypes for different user journeys and happy paths. Here are some of them.

WIREFRAMES

testing

With a visual prototype in hand, I was now ready to do some testing. I ran a series of Usability Testing and User Acceptance Testing for a week with potential users. My primary tool, Maze, was used for testing throughout our design process.

Heat map by Maze

Design system

The initial design system took a week to create.

I created a comprehensive design system for the solution. That included typography, icons, cards, modals, and other UI elements. I determined that the brand personality would be friendly, casual, yet brilliantly clear.

Icons

typography

colours

Slide right for dark mode ->

Components

implementation

After 2 more weeks of iteration, I started implementing the design to clickable prototypes.

I used Figma for clickable prototypes to quicken the implementation process.

Mockups

takeaways

Lessons learnt

A key takeaway from this project was to focus on building a minimum viable product. As a creative, most of my time was spent perfecting the UI. There is only so much time and effort that you can invest in this fast-paced world. So, it's important to focus on the features that can deliver the highest value for your users. At the end of the day, we are solving users' pains. It's easy to lose sight of this when you're deep in the computational tasks.