Dumpling

Each year, a team of 6 high school students is selected and challenged to build and launch a technology company in 10 weeks, culminating in a pitch to investors, VC firms, and Fortune 500 executives. The Zero to Sixty Fellowship was created and supported by Vora Ventures based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The team: Haley Dues (Product Manager), Megan Cui (Front-end), Jonathon Mangan (Front-end), Nicholas Reichert (Front-end), Torey Hilbert (Back-end)

My role: Product Design & Strategy

Responsibilities: Conducting user research, developing surveys, conducting interviews, establishing the strategic direction, designing and iterating on prototypes, and completing the final visual design.

Timeline: 9 weeks, June - August 2018

Tools: Sketch, InVision, Adobe Illustrator

First, we had to understand what students thought about their spending. As a team, we reflected on our own pain points and concerns about our financial habits. We spent the first week conducting extensive online research. I worked with our PM to draft surveys and develop phone interview questions. I summarized the insights from the interviews and survey responses and created a persona to guide my design decisions.

It seemed like there were plenty of personal finance apps in the market. Why weren’t they working? We asked ourselves what we needed, researched the market to find parallels, and looked at competitors to see what they lacked.

Disclaimer: the features highlighted in my analysis are only up to date as of the time of this project (Summer 2018). Recent app updates that resolve the issues I discuss are not reflected.

Since Mint was created in 2006, the platform has grown to have over 20 million users. However, we also found that only 8% of their users are young adults, and 59% stop using Mint after a month of signing up. Why was Mint struggling to capture and retain the attention of young spenders?

Joy’s pastel aesthetic and claims to help users “spend happier” seemed to appeal to a younger college-age audience.

In its efforts to encourage “happier spending”, the app was focused on binary ratings for each spend: a green smiley face or a red frown. While it was an exciting unique approach, rating my spending was never simply happy or sad. How would I categorize an impulsive and financially irresponsible (yet delicious) burger outing I joined when I had packed a lunch? What about filling a prescription? Buying fertilizer for my house plants? Joy oversimplified the rating system as most of my transactions could not simply be labeled as happy or sad, and I struggled to see how this style of categorization would improve my approach toward my spending.

But were there any apps I could look examine that effectively helped people build habits?

I’ve been using NRC for several years. I knew it had been very effective in helping me improve my lifestyle, but I wanted to understand why.

After I started completing Global Challenges, I got several friends to join the app so we could create custom challenges. Every time the app alerted me that a friend started a run, I felt more compelled to get off the couch myself. The challenges channeled our competitive spirit and brought out some snarky trash-talk that pushed us to run more.

Additionally, according to a study on accountability by the American Society of Training and Development (ASTD), individuals who have committed to others that they will complete a goal have a 65% chance of success, which can increase to a 95% chance of success if they have “specific accountability appointments" to check in with someone on their progress.

• Do use some competitive element for motivation. Even tiny badges offer a sense of accomplishment, and competing with friends can be positive peer pressure.
• Don’t bombard users with negative feedback without providing any feasible solutions.
• Do consider that people have different values and priorities regarding our spending which should not be neglected.
• Don’t lose young adult audiences with overwhelming and hyper-specific long-term goals.
• Do only share high-level stats with friends and keep sensitive details hidden from profiles, especially regarding personal finances.

We narrowed our problem statement into two "How Might We" statements:

Hypothesis: How might we teach users what smart spending looks like?

Claim: Teach users how to think about spending by providing feedback each time the user spends money.

Hypothesis: How might we help users stay accountable for making responsible spending decisions?

Claim: Help users leverage their social networks to use social accountability to help each other to spend smarter.

Our goal was to assign each purchase a Spending Score out of 100. Similar to a credit score, a Spending Score could provide an easy snapshot of one’s spending effectiveness. For example, a Spending Score of 78 could mean that 78 of every 100 dollars is well spent. A numerical rating would also help students visualize improvement over time.

To build the Spending Score algorithm, we decided to ask users to complete a “Check-in” after each purchase. By prompting students to answer a short set of questions reflecting upon each purchase, we hoped to train students to ask themselves important questions before spending their money, thus teaching them how to think about spending.

But what exactly would a check-in entail? What factors determine if a spend is 'smart'? What should students consider when deciding whether to make a purchase?

We interviewed several 17–22-year-old students to share a few recent purchases and explain their thought processes before spending, as well as reflecting on how satisfied they were with each spend.

This research confirmed that users' thought processes around purchase decisions are far more complex than any binary rating. But how could we capture these considerations in a check-in process that was short enough to quickly complete for every purchase, yet not oversimplified like Joy?

After pouring through the massive bank of questions we gathered from our interviews, we analyzed the trends and determined that ultimately how ‘smart’ a spend is comes to 5 main factors:

1. Did you need it?
2. How much did you want it/was it an impulsive purchase?
3. Was it a good value?
4. Could you afford it?
5. How does it impact your long-term financial goals?

We put tested our questions by evaluating dozens of bank transactions on the 5 factors. This testing revealed two additional considerations:

1. 

   Questions vary significantly by category. Rating the long-term value of a purchase could be relevant when buying a blender, but it would seem trivial for a restaurant meal.
   
   How this changed our product: I decided to keep the 5 core factors consistent but develop customize the wording for questions in each category.

2. People have different values toward spending. Some people never purchase anything without at least weeks of research and deal hunting, while others spend more freely but are equally satisfied with their spending. To account for this variation, we would have to understand the users's unique values toward spending to adjust the weights of each check-in question.

   • What is your goal minimum amount you aim to keep in your bank account at all times?
   • When making a purchase, how important is the need you have for an item? (1–5)
   • When making a purchase, how much do you take into consideration how long you have been looking for a similar item? (1–5)
   • If you go into a purchase with an amount you are willing to spend on the item, how much do you take that amount into consideration? (1–5)

With that, our backend developer Torey developed an algorithm to score each purchase and used exponential moving averaging to calculate an overall spending score that would update with each new purchase.

My primary design goal was to keep the check-in flow should be short and simple so that a user can easily fit the habit of completing check-ins into their day—before a lecture starts, riding the bus, or right before bed. This focus on habit-building contributed to our broader goal that over time students would internalize the questions and ask themselves before spending money rather than only considering these things after the fact.