FANJO
Banking service and mobile app for teens to develop Financial Literacy
TEAM
Jamie Curran, Shannon Lin, Zoe Feng,
Tianmi Fang, Radha Nath
DURATION
3 Months
Oct.2017 - Dec. 2017
Service Design Crouse @CMU
CLIENT
PNC Bank Service
MY ROLE
-
Planned and conducted user research
-
Designed storyboards, wireframes, prototypes and the service blueprint
-
Crafted the style guide
INTRODUCTION
The Problem with
Teen Finance Literacy
PARENTS want financially responsible teens but also want control.
TEENS, however, can only learn to be responsible with money when they have money.
Our Identified
Opportunities
The service facilitates a gradual transfer of agency from parents to teens, starting with helping the teen to save for what they want utilizing a game as the incentive.
The service can also help PNC generate lifelong, financially responsible customers.
FANJO is a banking service that is catered to teens for developing financial literacy, providing them with…
A Personalized
Banking App
Gamified
Incentives
A Unique Savings /
Checking Account
KEY FEATURES
Create Achievable Saving Goals
Teens create their own savings goals which are broken into achievable milestones automatically.
Especially, through the application teens can request and negotiate parental funds matching to help save towards goals. Parents can agree if they think the goal is valuable.
Become more financially responsible
As teens complete savings goals, they unlock achievements. Achievements mean new financial responsibility -- loans, credit card, and investing.
Achievements can facilitate discussions between parent & teens about financial responsibility
More Motivated to Save
Money saved in the real world means money available in the game world using separated game apps provided by financial entertainment organizations.
DESIGN PROCESS
RESEARCH & SYNTHESIS
Dipping Our Toes
Research has shown that Financial Literacy, especially among America’s youth, is dangerously poor. This is especially problematic as it is increasingly easy for young adults to obtain credit, spend “virtual” money, and accrue huge college debt. To address this problem, we proposed to explore and collaboratively design, with PNC, services where Teens and Parents can learn and practice financial basics by playing with real money. In addition, placing parents in the role of tutor will help to increase their financial literacy. The insights generated from the research included:
Literature Review
20+ paper about Financial Literacy of teens
User Interviews
8 teens with their parents
Competitive Analysis
15 mobile APPs and education programs
01
Personalize Financial Education
Financial Education is most effective when it’s related to teens immediate needs and when they have the opportunity to make and discuss financial decisions.
02
Focus on the Parent-Teen Relationship
The largest impact for financial education happens between parents and teens.
Teens are curious to learn
Teens want to know about opening and using checking and savings accounts, obtaining credit, car buying and buying clothing/personal-care items.
03
04
Focus on 14-18 years old teens
PNC has a large gap in their services and educational materials between middle school and college students.
Visualizing What We Know
Current State
This model shows the current state of value flow between a financial service, teens, and parents where the control over a typical teen’s financial decisions lies with the parents. We believe this is a missed opportunity for a financial service to facilitate discussion and learning.
Ideal State
In an ideal state, a service can facilitate a transfer of agency from the parent to the teen, while still allowing the parent to supervise.
What this model shows are the values gained through the opportunities for a service to provide financial education by facilitating financial discussions.
User Personas
We developed two main personas, Tommi (a financially unmotivated teen who wants to buy things) and Janice (a hard-working busy mom who really worries about her teen going to college and being financially responsible).
Narrow Down the Scope
After synthesizing all research findings, we redefined our opportunity statement and identified detailed design opportunity areas.
01
How might we enable parents to still have supervising power while transferring agency over purchases?
02
How might we help the teen become more aware of the potential effects of spending/saving?
03
How might we allow teens to not have to always ask parents for money and permission?
#REDEFINED OPP STATEMENT
Parents want financially responsible teens but also want control. But teens can only learn to be responsible with money when they have money for which to be responsible.
We want to create a banking service that can facilitate a gradual transfer of agency from the parent to the teen, while still allowing the parent to supervise and influence.
Brainstorming
Following developing our personas and clarifying opportunities, our team ran brainstorming exercises to generate over 50 concepts of services and features.
IDEATION
Storyboarding & Speed Dating
After much discussion, we focused on three scenarios by developing them into storyboards:
Simulate the Real World
Give the teen money and the freedom to make financial decisions. Learning will take place when making trade offs between different needs.
Supervised borrowing
Teen budgets but can borrow money when needed and pay it back. Teach the teen that borrowing now is more expensive that paying later.
Matching Savings
Use matching from parent to incentivize teen to save. Test what level of involvement parent is willing to have
5 Teens age 13-17 and 5 parents participated in the speed dating. We made three design decisions based on the strong reactions from speed dating.
01
Make saving achievable
We heard a need from our speed dating teens for help with what to do with the money have already. There was also an opportunity to help teens overcome the barriers to saving for a big goal by breaking it down into smaller pieces.
02
Introduce games as the incentive
A concern we had about our scenarios were that they were not exciting enough to keep a teen (or parent’s) interest. This led us to revisit some early concepts around games, and decided to use games as a incentive.
03
Help parents empower teens
Teens can only become more responsible financially by dealing with real money. We wanted to motivate parents to give teens more control over their purchases, while keeping necessarily supervising power.
Introduce A New Stakeholder
From prior research, we knew 77% of teens age 15-17 play games on mobile phone or tablet. By investigating deeper about the game industry, we also found there are ‘non-profit financial entertainment organizations’, like Common Wealth, which focus on building games teaching financial skills to kids and teens.
We proposed that PNC could partner with a Non-Profit Financial Entertainment Company for the best experience and gaming production quality for the service. This added an interesting twist to the evolution of the Ideal Value Flow model
VISUALIZiNG THE SERVICE
Clarifying the Service Details & Features
Our reframe, gave us a lot to think about, so we started writing high-level user stories of how different stakeholder would interact with the system. Our running document of user stories was grouped into potential features. These brought up multiple questions that led to group discussions with the goal of the team gaining a shared understanding of the service. Finally, we defined the four most important features in our service.
01
Decompose saving goals into milestones
When teens establish saving goals, we help them to decompose goals into achievable milestones, which motivate teens to achieve goals step by step.
02
Motivate teens by game rewards
Teens can get rewards in mobile games from every dollar they saved in their bank account.
Teens can reach achievements to unlock responsibility
By proving their financial responsibility as achieving goals gradually, teens can be allowed to unlock new financial responsibilities like debit cards, credit cards and loans.
03
04
Engage parents in savings
We inform parents when their teens create a new saving goal, and they could discuss in-person to agree on a matching ratio.
After defining the service, we created a service blueprint to articulate the action of each stakeholder and user in the product journey.
Wireframing
To support the service, we decided to design a new mobile app for teens. This personalized bank app provides unique saving service and nests with popular financial education games. We highlighted the most crucial actions of teens in the flow.
Because of the time limitation, we only have time to design the important interfaces in the app. I conveyed sketches into five digital low-fidelity interfaces, and tweaked it with three quick-and-dirty usability tests
Whiteboarding of interfaces and interactions
Designing the Style Guide
To better organize and manage the interface design, I created a design guide, which enables the team to create consistent and delightful design in the future.
MOVING FORWARDS
This project only took 3-month but we designed an innovative service with high potential. Given more time we would love to explore and develop the following areas of the service
