PAyMon App redesign
PayMon is a company that offers software and hardware (POS) that connects school cafeterias to their students via a digital wallet. Schools are able to input their lunch and snack offerings and parents can monitor their children's spending as well as put safeguards on dietary restrictions and pre-order their lunches.
In our original project brief, we were asked to help PayMon in their goal to empower the youth to expand their financial knowledge. The place that they were looking to improve was the student dashboard and looking into implementing a financial education hub flow.
3 Week Design Sprint | Mobile App Redesign
My Role
Design Role
Project Manager
Research Lead
UX/UI Design
Primary Contributions
User Interviews, Competitive/Comparative Research and Analysis, User Journey, Personas, User Flow, Wireframes, User Testing, Prototypes, Presentation
Tools
Figma, Trello, Slack
Project Overview
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Taking care of finances can feel like a daunting and nerve racking task that many of us find challenging. Whether that's because we don't have the skills yet or because it's easier to spend rather than save. Imagine if you began to discover and practice financial skills as a teen. You would be better equipped with the tools you need to tackle the financial hurdles thrown your way as an adult.
With our solution you would be more familiar with the concept of budgeting, how it can help you tackle your financial goals, and why it can improve your spending habits. In turn better preparing you for your future financial endeavors.
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Whether it's a lack of knowledge or spending habits that get in the way, budgeting and saving money can be stressful to many. Causing people to unsuccessfully budget and not save altogether.
With PayMon’s long term goal of providing their services to a wider range of students, moving from only private schools to servicing public schools as well. I would encourage PayMon to consider creating a website rather than just an App. This would increase accessibility and allow PayMon to reach users who may not have access to the app or a mobile device.
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Our clients customers were based out of Ecuador. This presented a few challenges for our design team.
Difficulty reaching our users.
Legal issues with users being minors
Users are located in another country
Language barriers
Users where on summer break
Because our client was developing and launching the app in a different country they had many technological constraints that we wouldn’t normally have.
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To address our users' needs we created a budgeting tool kit for the users of PayMon. It allows users to practice budgeting with easy-to-use tools and insights and trends related to their spending. Our design and solution allows users of PayMon to budget and track their lunch money providing the crucial building blocks to financial success.
My Design Process
User Research - Uncovering Users needs and feelings toward financial stability
Goals
To better understand users' needs we conducted user interviews and surveys. We developed a survey to send out to student users of PayMon as we felt this was the easiest way to glean some information from high school students who would normally not give us the time of day.
Our Client even offered an incentive for those users who completed the survey. We initially hoped that we would get some great results from the survey and also reach out to some of those students who responded with a follow up interview.
After we only got 1 response, as research led I decided we needed to conduct our own research with teens in our community to get the answers we were looking for to move the project forward.
Our team conducted 12 interviews of teens in our community asking them questions about money, savings, working toward goals, and budgeting. We gained some valuable information and here are some of our key findings…
What we learned
Users feel stressed when thinking about money and savings.
Users' lack of self control impedes their savings.
Users have limited or no formal training on finances and are unsure how to achieve their financial goals.
The competitive analysis we conducted helped us identify features the industry currently has and how we might be able to improve on them for our client.
We found that the competitors within the school cafeteria industry focus on the transactions, but do not provide any educational resources. We also discovered that many of the competitors that align with PayMon's long term vision offer the ability to set financial goals, spending alerts and notifications, personalized financial tips, and a categorical breakdown of spending trends.
During our research phase we realized the need for insights from parents whos kids might use the app. We then conducted more interviews and found the following…
We were able to learn what kinds of metrics / information parents needed to see in order to feel confident in how their students were budgeting and learning about finances.
Looking at these takeaways we were inspired to develop the best solution for their pain points and problems and our findings better anchored us in the design process.
Competitive & Comparative Analysis
Nerdwallet
Apple card
After conducting our initial research we were able to synthesize our information and begin to create the building blocks (Personas, Journey Maps, Problem Statements) for our design.
I noticed that the competitors within the school cafeteria industry focuses on the transactions, but do not provide any educational resources. Because of PayMon’s long-term vision, we researched competitors offering financial resources such as goHenry, Nerdwallet, FamZoo and Greenlight.
gohenry
Famzoo
We noticed that competitors utilized the main dashboard to highlight the functions of the app.
Some features that the competitors are offering:
Ability to set financial goals
Spending alerts and notifications
Personalized financial tips
Categorical breakdown of spending
Personas
For our team we created 3 very different personas from our user research. These personas shared our users' pain points and frustrations and helped guide our design solution. Maria is our primary person and we used her to craft our problem statement. Once we had our problem statement we quickly realized we needed to go back to create a 4th persona, the persona representing the parents using this app, Ramon. We then had to go back and create a whole new set of interview questions and conduct more user interviews to be able to develop our parent persona.
MAria
Needs:
Independence so she can spend time with her friends
She needs a way to save money toward a car to have more agency to go where she wants with friends
Needs to build healthy spending and saving habits
Motivations/Goals:
Enjoy her current social lifestyle (make the most of the moment before college)
Pain Points:
Overwhelmed by the idea of saving for something as big as a car
Lack of knowledge on how to save
Ramon
Needs:
To teach his children how to budget their lunch money
Track his children’s spending habits
Motivations/Goals:
Wants his children to be successful budgeters
Wants to teach his children to be independent
Pain Points:
Did too much for his children growing up and didn’t give them the budgeting skills they need
Wants to allow for his kids to learn through experiences but wants to keep an eye on them
Journey Map - Identifying areas for improvement
We used the journey map to empathize with the deep emotional dips in the user’s experience. By doing this we were able to identify some major opportunities for design improvements.
Some opportunities we keyed in on are:
Providing a way to help users save towards a goal
Giving users notifications and alerts on their spending
In this journey map we wanted to take our Maria through the process of using the PayMon app to budget their lunch money and show their parents.
Finally, giving users a way to view their spending trends
With the journey map it becomes even more clear the need for our parent persona. The parent needs to be able to see their students spending trends as well, seeing as they have the final decision making power.
Problem Statement
Through all our research we gleaned that
Maria needs a way to track her spending
She needs a way to budget her lunch money
She needs a way to connect with her parents on her spending
Maria is saving towards a car that she plans to purchase with the help of her parents, she needs a way to budget her spending because she wants to show her parents she is financially responsible to help her pay for her car.
User Flow
User flows provide us as designers with the steps a user is going to take to go through our solution. This informs us what frames we need to develop, what needs to live on those frames, and where those frames live within the flow.
We made two separate user flows to see the different ways a user might use the PayMon app. The first flow gave us insight into the steps our persona takes when ordering food on the app. This showed us where we might be able to improve our personas experience and solve for some of their needs. The second user flow showed us how our primary persona would use the app to interact with a tertiary persona and how they could both benefit from our design solution.
Wireframing & prototyping
From vision to reality
Once a user flow was established, our team came up with ideas to begin sketching out some low fidelity wireframes. Wireframes are the bones of our design. They are the building blocks on which our whole solution is built on. The wireframes give us a general idea of how the solution is going to look and what it is going to feel like. We use wireframes to improve some of the heuristic violations identified in our earlier research as well as implement our solution. After making adjustments and deciding on a final solution, we created some mid-fidelity wireframes. This phase helped us better understand our vision for the solution - our blueprint. By creating a mid-fidelity prototype we were able to test our design solution, find any pain points or problems and make final edits.
What we were looking for…
1) Verify users can easily navigate PayMon features
2) Verify the new design feature helps users to create a budget for spending their lunch money
3) Verify users can easily see and track their spending trends
User Testing
Usability tests are used to help us identify any mistakes or improvements we can make to the prototype to further improve the user experience.. We found some issues during these tests.
Users thought “today’s budget” was too small on the dashboard, so we added UI elements to highlight this function.
Users were confused when interpreting “My Budget” during checkout, so we distinguished it by adding Total, My Budget, and Difference for clarity.
Users thought the colors of the graphs were too similar, so we added contrasting colors to the graphs for readability and accessibility.
Users felt the checkout was abrupt and were confused why there was no modal, so we added an affirmation modal for consistency.
We also got some feedback about the flow of one section of the user flow and improved on that as well.
Prototype
Budget Calculator:
This will give the user the information they need to meet their budgeting goals and an easy way to see how their previous spending affects their current budget.
Reminders & Notifications:
With these notifications and reminders we believe the user will gain an increased awareness of their spending habits and begin to make decisions that will make a positive financial impact.
Spending Trends Page:
The trends page is the central hub of all the users spending habits on PayMon. You can see a categorical breakdown of what you spend your types of items you spend your money on and you can see how much you spend in total. This will allow the users to make changes to their spending to better help them achieve their goals.
Friendly/Welcoming/Calming UI elements:
By utilizing key UI elements like color palate, typography, personalization, and micro-text we believe we will help alleviate some of the negative feelings our users have towards saving. These positive experiences can lead to better financial habits and increased awareness of spending, in turn helping users better prepare for the real world.
Outcomes
With the implementation of these new features, we believe we can start to give kids the tools they need to successfully budget their money. By providing a safe and welcoming space for them to practice budgeting with the help of PayMon and their parents, these teens will have an opportunity to develop the skills they need to budget their finances successfully as an adult.
Next Steps
Improving the Parent mode for viewing spending trends for multiple kids in their dashboard
A social aspect connecting users to save money together and encourage each other to save toward a goal
Increase engagement through gamification. Earning badges or rewards for meeting your budget
Developing a possible saving goal page where users can practice saving money toward a goal like a new pair of shoes