Creating a Family Banking feature for Fintech "Strands", to promote financial education and responsibility of children.
Role: UX/UI Designer
Duration: 12 days
Responsibilities: UX Research, UI Design, Prototyping, User Testing
Client: Strands
Project Scope
This project aims to design a financial management application, focusing on enhanced usability, accessibility, and visual appeal. The application should cater to the needs of both parents and children.
Problem Statement
Banks need to offer a Family Banking solution, to compete in order to acquire new customers early, because this will increase client retention.
Hypothesis
How can banks reduce the risk of losing existing and potential customers to the competition?
Our UX team believes that by Strands developing a white-label, user-personalized, and engaging family banking app, we can help banks acquire and retain customers through mass user adoption and engagement. In this way, banks can retain existing clients but also attract new ones.
Who is Strands?
Strands is a fintech company with experience in Open Finance, Machine Learning, and AI. Their mission is to enhance customer engagement for financial institutions and improve financial wellness through hyper-personalized solutions.
Strands objective was to implement into their already existing Personal Finance Management, the Family Banking feature. Through that:
- Children (12-17 years old) would have their own application to manage their money
- Parents (through their existing bank account) would overview how their kids spend/manage their budgets
Why Family Banking?
Parents want the best for their children. This includes a good financial education.
So let’s just imagine Laura.
Laura is a mother of 2 kids and wants to find a banking solution for them, so that they can learn about money. She will eventually do a research on this and will find out about a lot of banks that have already implemented a family banking solution into their products.
"The Google search term “bank account for kids” has increased by 120% within the last 12 months"
Benchmark
And of course, as demand increases, so does the competition.
So, the first we did when we started working on the project, was to conduct a competitive analysis, to gain a better understanding as to the products and features that already exist in the market, and what the other competitors are offering.
Laura could easily pick one of these options and switch from her traditional bank.
Insights
Parents can control at any time their children’s spendings
“Saving goals” feature for the children
Parents can set “chores” to the children, and they get back money in return
Gamification
Constraints
Due to the limited amount of time that we had in our disposal, we had to make some decisions regarding our priorities and the methodology that we were going to follow in order to address this project.
One of our main concerns was the fact that we did not have access to the Asian market and thus we wouldn’t be able to interview people from Vietnam and focus on their specific banking and financial needs.
Strands had already provided us with the specific family banking features that each application (parents and kids) would have, since banks already know what type of product they need.
Research
Throughout our research phase, it was very important for us to understand the needs of our client and their business, but also make sure that the product we were creating was user-centered, so that customers would want to use it.
Decision
We decided to focus on:
The client’s needs: in other words, the demand of other banks that will eventually buy Strand’s product
The parents’ needs: as they will be the ones deciding if they want to use the product for their families
The children’s preferences: as we want the kids’ application to be engaging and be used long-term from them
Banks
Strands had already provided us with a list of features that banks (their own clients) were asking for, so we had to prioritize them and focus on the designing of the applications.
These features are:
Parent’s application:
- They link to their own bank account, the kids account, so they can have an overview of what they spend
- They set spending limits and budgets
- They can set tasks for their kids
- They can receive notifications of their kids transactions
Kid’s application:
- They can complete the tasks provided from their parents and get money when they complete them
- They can create their own saving goals, and gather money in order to achieve them
- They receive notifications when their parents send them money or when assigning a task
Parents
But of course, we care about the users and what they need.
We conducted interviews with European users, as we thought that we could build the application based on their needs and the insights gathered.
As a next step, the primary research could also expand to Asia, and so features and possible uses of the app would adapt.
We found out that parents are concerned about:
Insights
They are concerned about their kids difficulty to saving money
They want their children to be educated on financial responsibility
They believe it is important for kids to be able to understand the value of money
Furthermore, concept testing was conducted to a lot of users, as we wanted to understand better how they view them and what they think of the features that we were planning to include.
More Insights
Parents really liked the idea of the application
They found very interesting the fact that kids can save their own money and achieve their goals
The setting “tasks” feature and giving money to your kid as a return, seemed to worry them
Children
Through secondary research, we found out that:
According to *Fintech Times
Also, in order to ensure that we were creating a product that teenagers would want to use, we made a research on the applications that they are mostly using nowadays, as well as their favorite artists and aesthetics.
Insights
A lot of contrast between colors, black and white
Presence of vibrant colors
Ideation
Based on all the insights we gathered from our research , we created low-fi wireframes for the kid’s application, in order to start testing as soon as possible.
For the parent’s application we had to follow the current UI of their bank application that reflects the brand value of Strands.
For the kid’s application, we could experiment more regarding the UI and the style and colors that we could apply. So we decided on the following Style Tile:
Outcome
After conducting usability testing, we ended up designing the following flows.
Kids application
Parent’s application
But what about the settings tasks/missions to the children that seemed to worry the parents earlier?
Well after a lot of concept testing with parents, we decided to add the option to hide the amount of money that their kids would gain after completing a mission. In that way, kids would receive a reward and they would see the balance of their account increase, only after completing it.
Furthermore, it would keep the users more engaged, as based on the “Hook model” a variable reward that changes each time, creates excitement.
“We love surprises and the hunt for something rewarding and different keeps us engaged.”
Reflexions/Key learnings
Working for Strands, and helping to design two products for a Family Banking solution, has been a challenging but at the same time one of the best experiences I had. Some of the key learnings were:
- I learned that sometimes you need to follow a different process to approach a problem and its solution, and learn how to prioritize.
- You have to find a way to satisfy the client’s and the business’ need, but also make sure that as a ux designer, you take into account the needs of the end-user. In that way, you make sure that what you design actually provides a solution to an existing problem, and that users will engage with it.
- Alignment within a team can be challenging, but with open communication and justification of your decisions, the project can move forward.
- The project’s scope has to be clear from the beginning, in order to avoid trying to solve multiple problems at the same time, which can only lead to confusion.
Next steps
As for the next steps, I would continue with the following:
- Conduct more user testing to the parent’s application, to discover possible issues and to validate our design decisions.
- Interview kids (12-17 years old) to understand better their needs and then iterate on the kid’s application.
- Try to gain access to users from Asia and interview parents and kids, to create a more personalized product for a specific market and ensure engagement.
Thank you for reading!