A Case Study
Piggly made while at General Assembly

Saving for Millennials

What does one do after 30 hours of a User Experience certificate course by General Assembly? Make a case study that's what! At the beginning of the class they ask you to pick from one of four projects, 3 of which were pre-set and the 4th was more of a choose-your-own-adventure. At the time Chase had just introduced a new credit card targeted towards Millennials and it seemed amazing, but credit cards lead to debt and it seems to be all anyone uses. Employed Millennials earn money solely to spend on the next big thing, the latest gadget, the hottest clubs and the best dinner spots. Make money, spend money, repeat. Is there something missing here? My project was going to be about the missing link. Does anyone even save money In between the making and spending process? I certainly didn't think so.

The Hypothesis

Millennials don't think towards the future or even plan for it for that matter. Their main focus is the Now. They prefer to use their money on current issues. Things they need now rather than what they might need in the future.

The Project

My goal was to make an app that can encourage Millennials to actually save their money towards realistic goals that they can set for themselves. Doesn't that sound neat? After all it will be super useful for everyone to use and they will love it soooo much! I can design it and put it in the App Store and make a TON of cash ‘cause everyone is going to download it and tell all their friends. Right? Left. Doing things on a whim like that can only lead to failure. Planning, research, interviews, personas and much more was yet to come.

Research
Competitive Analysis
In order to have a good grasp on what the app should be, I first had to look at would be competitors such as typical bank apps (chase, ally, discover etc) and stand alone apps like Mint, Level Money, Digit, Qapital, Tip Yourself and Prosper Daily. These apps were all money related and found in the Apple App Store with over 3 star ratings. Apps with lower ratings were only looked at if mentioned during interviews. It is also important to look at apps that are not direct competitors, to look at a highly successful app and see how it functions and notice the things that make them great. For this I looked at Instagram and Quest. Instagram is a photo sharing app that gained its popularity in the early years only to be taken over by facebook. While what made it great was the photo sharing aspect, I had noticed that in all its years of service to its growing community the navigation had remained virtually unchanged. Of course updates were done, new features were added here and there, along with a spiffy new UI. But they never touched their main navigational system that sat at the bottom of the feed page. Why fix something if it ain't broke? Other navigational elements were also taken note of. Quest, although less popular is a simple to do list app that allows the user to level up, kill monsters and find armor upgrades just by checking off items from your list. It’s been proven time and time again that gamification if done right can do wonderful things for people. There is a reason why so many people are addicted to cell phone games like… dear I say it, Candy Crush and Pokémon Go. It’s because of achievements and reward systems for completing simple tasks. So I thought, “won’t it be great to to earn awards for saving your hard earned money?” And so the concept of the app was born, but would people like it?

Interviews
I had to interview 3 people that were in my target market, it was best to talk to people who did not know me but due to sensitivity of the information I was better off interviewing my peers since trust would not be an issue and no one would feel uncomfortable sharing information with me. The information given to me was confidential only to be shared with my mentor and to put to use for creating the app, so for your sake lets say I interviewed; Jack, Sally and Quinn. I gave them my pitch, explained what the app was about and ask for an unbiased opinion. The first interview was a simple question and answer, “what money management apps do you currently use, if any? (Include regular bank apps as well) biased on their response I would ask another question from my prepared list or go off script with a little improv if their answer was unexpected to could lead to more interesting information. All interviews consisted of audio recordings and taken physical notes. Enough information was gathered a Persona was created.

Persona; Meet Ruby

She is a 27 year old who makes her living selling handmade bags and purses on Etsy. She’s been at it for 5 years. She started her store while she was in college as a way to earn some extra money. After graduating she devoted all her time to her online store which ended up becoming her full time job. Saving is hard, as money coming in is quickly spent on student loans, food, utilities and raw materials to keep her business going. “Saving is very important, it’s what my dad always said” A quote taken from one of the interviews conducted earlier became something important to remember. People definitely know about saving, yet it’s hardly done. Why is this? Ruby for example has to keep her business going and pay off her loans as mentioned above, so why would she want to put money into an account to just sit there? The whole truth is that she does save, just not enough. What's the reason for this? It’s just too inconvenient, she needs an app for each of her banks, her credit cards and credit score.

Storyboard
The storyboard consisted of 3 screens, each of them showing a vital part of the app. We start with the set up screen, the app needs to know what banks you have along with your username and password so they it can manage your information. The next main screen after that is a feed of your most important transactions alerts and achievements. Lastly is an interesting AI chat bot feature that allows you to talk to the app via instant message. On first login it welcomes you to the app and displays a set of commands for you to try out. For example it may ask for further information on uncategorized transactions; “Hey, I’ve noticed you spent $50 at Bolivian Llama Party. How should it be categorized?” The user will then be prompted to to select a transaction category such as “Restaurant” or make a new category.

Features
It’s easy to dream up a super cool savings app that does everything for everyone, but the hard part comes when reality sets in and you have to determine which features are really needed and which can be released in updates and which should be trashed. To do this I made a list of all the features I could possibly come up with and then went back to Jack, Sally and Quinn to get their opinions on what they would like to use and how they would use it, in other words. What the needed to accomplish. Note that they never saw the entire list, they were strategically asked what they used the most and what they would like to see. Notes were made about common trends, which allowed me to make decisions on which features should be left out. Features such as Night Mode, Social Media Login, Referrals and Investment opportunities never made the cut. Whereas features such as Budgeting, Main Overview, Transaction History, Savings, Fico Score, Tips and Notifications have a starring role in the app.

User Flows
This is how the user would interact with the app when used. First time user would have extra steps to go through compared to returning users. This is the setup process. In the beginning all users had to begin by creating an account and the going through the process of adding their banks and then a budget, only then could they see their main overview of their transactions and from there they could go to their Transaction History (Later Renamed to Spending), Savings, AI alerts and achievements (the gamified portion of the app). Adding their banks would give the app access to this information. However when tested with my interviewees a “Skip” button was heavily requested. I felt that this was a great suggestion as I personally came into sign up problems while researching the user flows of app already in the App Store. One app in particular made me go through a monotonous setup process only to not function once I was supposed to get to the main page. Sometime you just want to skip the setup to have an understanding of what the app really is, despite having preview images and videos in the App Store, you never truly know until you experience it first hand.

Sketches
Many sketches were made in the process, 1st was for the story board which consisted of just 3 quick screens. These were then taken, tweaked and expanded upon while taking the user’s needs into consideration all along the way. These new sketches were made on cards roughly the size of an iPhone 6 screen. Sketches were made for almost every screen a user would want to interact with. Then to test these paper prototypes I met again with Jack, Sally and Quinn to get their reactions and thoughts on the project. Upon meeting with them I would give a quick brief on what the app is and then ask them to interact with the prototypes.Starting first with the Sign In page, they mostly realized that they would need an account since they have not used the app as yet and opted hit the Create Account link below the Sign In button. I would then switch out the card with the next step which was began the set up process. It was during this interview that I realized that the Skip button would be much preferred as all three interviewees expressed much interest in seeing how the app works before they committed to entering their bank information. Other than the addition of the skip button changes were made to navigational icons as well as page flows and some people raised concerns about the gamification portion of the app, saying that they would never use it, it's unnecessary or better off as a version 2 or a paid feature while others expressed much interest and loved the idea.

Wire frames
My favorite part of UX is when it all starts coming together and you can actually see how the work in shaping up in the digital world. Lo-fi sketches and hi-fi sketches were made. Lo-fi first just to quickly get a feeling for where things needed to be and work, hi-fi for a more real approach of how it looks and functions. All of the research and interviews that came before making these wire frames allowed the process to be faster and less tedious than it would have been if ever all the previous steps were left out. Documentation was then made on how the app should function. You may have noticed that in my sketches “App Name” was used as a placeholder for the name of the app. One of my mentors also took notice of this while discussing my wireframes and asked “uhh, its not actually going to be called App Name is it?” I told her about the names I was thinking of, and then one quick brain storm session and Piggly was born!

Prototype
Yet again another prototype, but this time it's all digital; made using Invision App. I already had experience using this website from my web design classes in college so I flew by this portion with no problem. Using the documentation made in the last step I made the prototype to function the way I saw fit after making the wire frames.

Usability Test
Jack, Sally and Quinn were called up on last time to to test the digital prototype. They clicked through as they would normally while trying to completed a set of 3 tasks I assigned to them. I watched some of them find things immediately while other struggled as I sat there in silence unable to help. I also asked for their thoughts on the name of the app, and they all approved. Money doesn't always need to be serious and boring, in fact saving towards a goal should be fun! Like the pre-game before the concert. After they were done, their recordings were replayed over and over while I took notes. This ended the project but I still went back to tweak things here and there according to the feedback given during the last interview. Now having a money saving app in my portfolio I am happy where it stopped at but I had a drawing teacher in college that always said “a painting can never be finished, only abandoned” Piggly may not be art per say, but I’m not ready to “abandon” it quite yet.

Conclusion
You may have some questions about things that were not covered in this case study, if you would like them answered feel free to schedule an interview.

I’d also like to thank all of my mentors at general assembly for being wonderful and assisting when needed with compelling and informative sessions.

https://invis.io/FN9506CQM

^{The addition of direct messaging and stories came about to fight snapchat but it’s core functionality and feed has remained the same.}

Affinity Map. Data was gathered and grouped to categories: pitfalls, prefered money management apps (What was already being used), how they currently save, primary uses of their apps, transaction history, possible incentives & hopes for the future.

Based on the Interviews, this Persona was created.

Storyboard - 3 quick sketches of would be key screens. Signing up, the home screen & chatbot AI.

Shows how the app could be interacted with.

Documentation; shows developers how the app should work.