I. Gain basic financial literacy (Design 1)

Amy is a first-year student at UPenn. She loves hanging out with friends after classes and celebrating with her water polo team after swim meets. Now that her first year ended early due to the move to online courses, Amy has had a lot of time to reflect on her first year of college. From this reflection, she realized that she spent more money during freshman year than she had thought. Amy doesn’t keep track of her spending on a daily basis but tries not to buy unnecessary things. However, she was surprised by the high sum of her bank statement bills for the past few months. Due to the pandemic and the worsening job economy, she feels a more definite need to start being financially responsible by creating and following a budget. She doesn’t know where to begin, so she tries to find an app or website that can help her learn how to budget. When trying to find the right budgeting platform, Amy searches for an app where she can connect with friends to feel motivated to learn and try different budgeting strategies.

II. Start saving money (Design 2)

Sammie is a junior at The University of Georgia studying Business. Outside of class, she spends time with her soccer team and at her work-study job, and occasionally treats herself by going to local cafes with friends to study and get lunch. Even though Sammie is a business student, she doesn’t have her finances in order. She wants to start saving for post-grad life, since she doesn’t know if she will be able to find a job right away due to the pandemic-induced recession. To start saving, Sammie decides to download a budgeting app that all her friends use. While on a bus ride to a soccer match, she opens and explores the app. She realizes that it is a useful budgeting and saving tool that could help her to track her expenses, analyze what she is spending the most money on, and track how much she is saving per month. She already loves the app because it allows her to easily see what she is spending money on per month and even week by linking her credit and debit cards to the app. She also likes how the app includes tips about good money management habits that will help her start saving money. She is excited to begin using the app.

III. Grow savings (Design 2)

Dylan graduated from the University of Texas a year ago and now lives with two of his friends in New York City. He has many bills; namely, rent, electricity, credit card, and student loan bills. Unfortunately, the pandemic has closed museums across New York City, so the museum that he works at had to cut all of its new employees' paychecks in half, including Dylan's own paycheck. As a result, he had to use part of his emergency savings to help pay his bills the first month of the paycut, since he failed to adjust his expensive eating out habit to be within the means of his decreased budget.
Dylan is extremely grateful to have had his emergency savings to lean on during the first month of adjusting his lifestyle to his new paycut. He is now inspired to grow his savings so that he will always have plenty in emergency funds. He realized that if he is careful, he can actually build his savings now that he is working from home, because he is no longer paying for commuting and has mustered the willpower to give up eating out. His roommate recommended to him an app that one can use to consolidate their financial information in one place. Dylan decides to download the app one day while bored. Dylan loves that the app consolidates all of his spending data in one spot, since it helps him to track his spending so that he can spend less and save more. After using the app steadily for a month, he is starting to see a steady increase in his savings and is feeling more confident about his ability to adapt to future financial emergencies.

Design Directions and Rationale

In the preliminary design stages, we decided on two design directions that were based on the two main ways that an app could help users gain financial literacy and confidence. The first is a learning app, and the second is a budgeting and savings tracking tool.

Design 1

Design 1 illustrates the system of a learning app in which users learn about personal finance through articles, podcasts, and videos. Upon opening the app, users can watch a tutorial about how to use the interface. Then, they fill out a questionnaire that will be used to customize the app's content to match their current amount of financial literacy and confidence. Design 1 includes a gamification aspect where users can advance through different levels after completing a video, podcast, or article. The strength of this design is that it can make learning about different financial topics fun, which may encourage young adults to actually want to learn about personal finance. It might also reduce the stress that individuals feel when they think about money since the gamification would hopefully make the app less stressful and more fun to use. The weakness of this design is that it does not help the app user to take concrete steps to apply their gained knowledge to how they budget and save, but rather solely provides them with the information needed to effectively do so.

Screen 2: An optional tutorial about how to use the app

Screen 3: A personal finance questionnaire that will be used to prompt user to define their finance goals and to gather information to use for curating the app content

Screen 4: The main landing page of the app that shows the user their current level

Screen 5: Page for exploring lessons and content

Screen 6: The information and play options that appears when an individual clicks on a video, podcast, or article

Screen 7: The page for when someone is listening to a podcast.

Screen 8: A weekly questionnaire that prompts users to reflect on whether they are meeting their goals

Design 2

Design 2 depicts the controls and layout of a budgeting and savings tracking tool where users can track their daily spending, create budgeting plans, and connect to resources for guidance. The three main pages include a planner where users can enter and categorize their expenses, a daily log where users can store and view their receipts, and a connect page where users can share and observe how other people manage their finances. The strength of this design is that it is a tool that would be extremely useful for maintaining financially sound budgeting and spending habits. It could potentially decrease the stress of the app’s users by acting as a platform where they can gain control over their finances. The main weakness of this design is that it assumes that its users already know how to effectively budget and save, which is often not the case with young adults.

Screen 1: The onboarding screen the user sees when they first access the app.

Screen 2: Page for tracking ones monthly spending

Screen 3: Page for setting daily budgeting goals

Screen 4: Page where users can see how others spend or save money

In-class Design Review Takeaways

Our three main takeaways were:

Increase gamification: The feedback from a design review session of Designs 1 and 2 pushed us to expand in the direction of Design 1 (the learning app) because people responded well to a learning app that uses gamification to increase financial literacy. Our peers mentioned that gamification could encourage users to learn more about financial topics since the app would be more fun, which was our goal. They mentioned that we could explore how other learning sites and apps, such as Khan Academy and Duolingo, make the learning process more fun for inspiration of how we could do the same in our own app. These sites and apps became useful references for us when we were figuring out how we could make our app more game-like. Due to the positive feedback to the gamification aspect, we iterated upon Design 1 to make it feel more like a game by adding different starting levels of difficulty and by creating a “Congratulations!” screen that shows a trophy each time that the user completes a video, podcast, or article.
Give the user more options: Our classmates also thought that the option to explore the lessons freely rather than only by completing levels would be useful, since it would give users more options for how to learn. As a result, we kept the “lessons” feature that is shown in Design 1’s paper prototype, but we renamed it “Explore” in order to make it sound more exciting. Our classmates also liked the idea of having a search bar and a filtering system that the user can use to find content relevant to their interests, so we kept Design 1’s “recent”, “topics”, and “recommended” filters in our future prototypes.
Follow our own gut: Additionally, we received positive feedback in regards to the questionnaire that was at the beginning of Design 1’s user flow, but we decided to exclude this questionnaire from our wireframe prototype since we thought that it might be annoying for potential new users. However, we later implemented a shorter version of the questionnaire in our final prototype due to feedback from a heuristic evaluation.

Ideation