ReLeaf
Rice University Design-a-Thon
I participated in my first design-a-thon for the first annual Rice University UX Design-a-Thon! This was open to any level of experience to undergraduate students all across the country.
Ideation
After meeting with my other 3 teammates for the first time, we discussed what track we wanted to do, Fintech or Health & Lifestyle. We decided that Health & Lifestyle would be difficult to approach with such a surplus of different types of health apps on the market, so we decided on focusing on Fintech.
We decided a unique way to approach the complex area like fintech would be to visualize it in a unique way. Instead of your normal minimalistic plain white and boring budgeting app, why don't we design a budgeting app that can be approached more like a mobile game?
User Research
Once we finalized our initial design ideas, we created a simple questionnaire with questions relating to what young adults would like to see in their ideal budgeting app.
With over 30 respondents, we found that people are mostly interested in tracking and budgeting their money and investing. Since a large portion of our respondents said they are not interested in a finance app, we want to create an app that will incentivize consumers from the start to be interested in managing their budgeting and other financial goals by having a fun and creative user interface.
Solution & Goals
The main issue we found with other fintech apps was that there is an oversaturation of too visually complicated apps with complex terminology that beginners would be deterred by. We wanted to combat this by using a unique approach of budgeting by "planting trees" as different budgeting strategies.
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Our ideal fintech app would not only make it easier for consumers to interact with the idea of tracking their spendings, but make it fun and interactive as well. We want everyone to have an easy-to-understand model comparing budgeting to planting a garden. The two priorities were:
1. Set up and Track Budget - Visualize data with simple graphics and icons for less numbers and noise
2. Social Aspect - Share virtual garden with friends and motivate each other to take care of them
Prototyping: Sketches
After figuring out the basic tasks we would be designing, we created some sketches and basic wireframes for those tasks.
Prototyping: Screens
We finalized what each screen in our prototype would show
1. Homepage
2. Budget Garden
3. One Example of a Budget Tree
4. Spending History
5. Friend Feed
6. Profile
7. Stocks Page
Final Product Demo
We succeeded in creating a prototype for an easy to understand and fun financial app for young people just beginning their finance management journey. Although ideally with more time we would have wanted to flesh out the logistics of some of the financial aspects of how friends can interact with other friends' gardens, we are proud of the product we made as most of us were beginners!