case study
Penny Bank
Project Vision
The proposed application, Penny Bank, is an app that intends to educate young audiences on the necessary financial critical thinking and independent decision-making skills required for online banking. Penny Bank is designed for 10 to 17-year-old kids to make online transactions under the digital supervision of guardians through a multifaceted login.
Challenges
1) Help kids get used to using digital money and get educated on the necessary financial critical thinking and independent decision-making skills.
2) Incorporate a way for both parents and kids to view and manage pocket money digitally.
3) Construct a detailed information page for money transactions and household duties.
Assumptions
We established a starting point where each team member had the opportunity to raise some specific questions such as
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How does the business strive to succeed in the market?
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what is our target market?
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why do users want to use our app? Or what goals do users want to achieve when using our app?
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How might we build the bridge between users and their goals through adding certain functionalities?
Solution
We wanted to design a solution that can help kids save pocket money towards goal purchase and facilitate healthy spending and saving habits. Moreover, from the data collected, we wanted to offer the functionality of managing household chores to parents and kids in order to make families’ engagement more fun.
User Research and Create Persona
We mainly conducted primary research methods like interviews and combined with secondary research methods like using online sources to define findings:
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Parents encourage kids to establish healthy spending habits and saving goals.
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Parents would like to know and control where kids spend money to.
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Parents would like to allocate household chores to kids so that kids can help share burdens of chores and earn pocket money.
Based on the above findings and understanding of users' pain points, we create three personas below:
SKETCHES
We ideated different ideas and then began the design process by creating wireframes of how we wanted the application’s layout to look, based on background work and methodology.
Wireframes
Lo-fi Prototype
The low-fidelity prototype was designed in an iPhone 13/13 Pro frame with a rudimentary design and digitally sketched in black and white.
Style Guide
We used dark blue, light blue, and light pink to convey energy and passion to our users. As per the color research, we found that blue, blue-green, and green well represent the youth. We wanted to select a sans-serif typeface that would integrate well with the soft look of our app. Thus, we chose Poppins as the main typeface.
logo ideation
Hi-fi Prototype
Based on our lo-fi prototype, we conducted internal usability testings within our group and came up with many improvements for the following iterations.
User Testing & Observation
To evaluate our system, we created a questionnaire of ten multiple-choice questions on Google Forms. Our horizontal prototypes had little functionality, but closely showcased our final interface. We added a disclaimer indicating the incomplete app status and encouraged volunteers to try any available functions.
Reflection
Due to the time constraint of the project, we were unfortunately not able to complete the whole design process. Although our mobile banking system meets many of the requirements we had aimed for during initial development, some of the limitations of our system are lack of alternative log-in options e.g. Google, Apple, or Facebook login, lack of emergency options e.g. ‘Help’ icon in the corner, to make accessing help in urgent cases easier and less stressful. The parental control option is another key feature of our app, given the aim of our app is to help parents and children learn about healthy saving and spending habits. It would have been better to include an explicit parental control page, with a similar set-up to the generic ‘Settings’ page included in the Sketches, but would allow parents to type in account limits and observe automatic data that displays the financial impact that the parental controls have had on their child’s account (e.g. ‘Katie decreased spending on toys’). Overall, our ‘Penny Bank’ system closely ranges to our ideal parent-child banking system, especially in the use of a familiar mobile banking-app pattern so that users are easily able to adjust and the family-friendly graphics used for backgrounds that clearly indicate the target audience.