Money for kids
--
A banking app for 12 to 16 year olds
Design challenge for a UX role. Took me 2.5 days to research, design and document
Challenge
Create a product for a a bank for specific target group of people between 12 to 20 years of age, to encouraging money management from an early age, and gearing towards a cashless economy and small goal based investments.
Research sources
Online articles
Hearing what parents are saying
Parents are concerned as schools have no curriculum for financial literacy.
Parents seek new and creative ways to teach children about money. Some parents look to instill a work ethic in children as they educate them about money.
Parents deeply want to instill the value of money in their children.
Competition analysis — RoosterMoney
RoosterMoney is a free kids’ allowance and chores app which helps parents and kids to manage allowances, set chores & save for goals!
Highlights
RoosterMoney has app interface for parents and child. A child without their own phone can access the app from their parent’s phone, through a passcode set by the parent. The parent gets substantial control and monitoring of their child’s account. Parent’s love the goals (free) and chores (paid) features on the app.
RoosterMoney allows parents to pay children in money, stars or badges — which is a good way to motivate kids and avoid expensive mistakes with real money.
Misses
The app doesn’t integrate with an easy payment system such as Google Pay or Paypal, and several parents commented they missed the convenience.
RoosterMoney only registers transactions that occur on the app. Any spends that occur outside the app do not register, and hence the budget and savings may not be accurate.
How we could differentiate our app?
The competitor apps are targeted to very young children. By focusing on users of age groups 12 to 20, we can design something that people in the teenager/young adult group can identify more closely with.
More defined goal setting process. Set target dates, define priority. When a goal is completed, enable sharing.
Integration with Google Pay and similar payment services.
Strong focus on financial education — focus on ideas to teach about cash flow, assets and liabilities, how investment and interest works. Quizzes about what they learned, which can be shared.
Badges based on achievements. Champ saver, Finance geek, etc
Content created by peers. We can highlight achievements of them and others on the app, or associated social media and news sites.
User Personas
User flows
For this project, let’s work on the following user story:
Bethany creates a profile for Ryan on the app. Ryan onboards, and creates a goal, and money and completes goal.
Setting up profiles
Goal setting
Prototype
Screens
Features in the future
Relinquish control
Add feature where parent’s can relinquish control and monitoring of the child’s account when the child has become an adult and/or achieved sufficient financial literacy to be able to operate their finances ind dependently.
Loan feature
A feature that will allow the child to borrow money on a loan from parents, which they have to pay back with interest. This will be an amazing way to learn about debt, financial burden and responsibility, and the pride, relief and satisfaction that comes from repaying your loan.
Investing and Entrepreneurship
Success metrics
- Increase in number of users using the app
- Increase in number of transactions
- Positive reviews, feedback and referrals from users.