Product design

UX research

Usability Testing

Prototype

Year

2020

A tool to facilitate parents educating money concepts to their children with a prepaid card.

Mobile App x Prepaid Card

I am always interested in the education topics especially parenting children because of the complexity, diversity and importance. An interesting one of them is to introduce the money concept to children. However, because children's personalities are clever, dynamic and constantly changing according to their ages, there are several ways to educate them but they can not be applied rigidly. Moreover, how can parents keep their eyes to their children tactfully to be able to enhance their independence?

Education perception is subjective. There are many factors that might affect the educating methodologies which are cultures, ages, parent perspective, older generation’s influence, children’s diverse personalities etc, thus it’s not easy to identify and target a specific group of users as well as getting the good insights.

Challenge

I began with identifying the should-understand areas following:

Understand parents and children’s experience in educating money concepts. Designing the experience for parents and children requires understanding them to eliminate conflict and enhance their engagement to the product.
Discover the existing methodologies in educating the money concept to have a solid understanding of the process, flow and pain points for following design ideas.
Design an experience environment for both parents and children. The needs, goals, and education perspective will be simplified and translated to the UI design to provide a tool for facilitating parents and children in parenting money concept

My goal

All Projects

Since this topic likely takes the attention of parents, there is much existing research centred around it thus I started with the open-source studies to enhance my understanding of target users who are parents and their children. One more round of observation is carried to complement my understanding from the existing digital products.

Secondary research

Features are designed for both parents and children. However, there is a blur boundaries between parents’ tasks and children’s tasks
Transparent process from earning, saving and setting goals
Confused function of paying or moving money to savings
Focus only on one method which uses allowance and chores to introduce kid about the process of earning and paying
Some products are too spare while some others are complicated and confusing
UI is interesting for children and teenagers

Compare the studies between Open-Source Research and Competitor Analysis, these existing apps seem to focus only on one money-educating method which is assigning chores although there are opposite thoughts about this of parents. I thought it could be a good idea to target a specific need of users thus I decided to use this idea on my Concept Testing and learn from the reaction of real users.

Competitor Analysis

Based on the study gathered from secondary research, interviews were conducted with 5 parents from 35 to 45 years old, they have at least 1 kid, aged from 5 to 20 years old. Although the final product is designed towards parents and children, in this stage I focus on parents’ insights first. Because, parents take critical roles in orienting education to their children according to their perspectives and make the decision whether or not to use this product. Additionally, the educating process should be designed by parents to meet their goals, expectations and be able to tackle their problems.

Besides, the Concept Testing is conducted along with the interview session, which is the fastest and effective way to visualise the education methodology into a UI design and validate with users. In order to sketch out the concept effectively, the User stories are sorted out to identify the key features with users’ needs in front and centre.

Objectives

Understanding user needs and goals
Validating ideas and features hypothesis

However, not stopping at parent’s insights, the following iteration of design and Usability testing will involve both parents and children to enhance the engagement as well as optimize the interface.

UX Strategy

“I think goal setting and saving critical for my kids”

“I think earning money by chores is a useful way, but I don't want my kid work for money instead of sharing family responsibilities”

“Teaching money concept gives my kids extra benefit such as approaching Mathematic, sharing family responsibility, being confident when shopping with their own money”

“Parents need alternative solution and flexibility in educating children when they growing up”

What do parents’ concerns look like?

Parents think chores helpful for children understand the concept of earning and saving money. However, they encounter the fact that when children are growing and being familiar with this process, they tend to claim the money for every single task and might be not keen on sharing family responsibilities. They get confused to select the right methods and be flexible according to the right periods of children's growth.
Parents doubt if children are able to comprehend the whole concept from earning, planning to saving for both long-term and short term goals and achieving. Therefore, they hesitate to allow children particularly from age of 8-10 to manage a large amount of money themselves, which is earned from different resources such as lucky money, birthday money, allowance. In contrast, they expect children to be more independent in keeping and controlling their money.

Education methods depend on many different aspects of education such as cultures, perspectives of parenting, children's age ranges, children’s personality, and so on. Therefore, the design aims to facilitate parents to optimise their parenting methods.

How might we facilitate parents to educate children about money concepts which allow them to be more flexible in using methodologies, and allow children to use bank accounts with the attention of parents subtly?

Opportunity

Design a tool to facilitate parents for their parenting with the entire process from earning, setting goals, saving and achieving.
The banking concept can be hidden under the process while they remain be able to keep the real money
A visual tool to enhance the understanding of children about parents’ conversations

Defining problems

32%

parents,

24%

kids say, they talk very often about money.

48%

parents agree,

50%

parents disagree that kids need to earn money (by given chores/tasks)

46%

of parents are having more conversations for some reasons, compared to 1 year ago,

94%

money conversations come from mom and dad

83%

of parents agree that saving is one of the most critical money skills.

56%

of parents say their kids need to learn smart spending skill.

Socialization Tools, Methods, and Strategies used by Parents

Allowances
Financial accounts
Family expenses
Cell phones plan
Informal work
Shopping as a Tool for Consumer Socialization in Families
Online shopping

The experience of parenting is the interaction from both sides of parents and children, thus, the visual storyboarding of this journey provides a deeper understanding of the next steps of ideation and testing. The storyboard begins with the moment of a parent thinking of introducing money to her kid. Followed by the practices of earning and spending money. The story ends with a few frustrating moments of both sides when some issues of money management emerged.

Storyboarding

This is the stage to transfer my ideas, my solution to an interactive product. The Userflow was begun to be able to structure my product and facilitate my Prototype creation for the Usability Testing.

The experience of parenting is the interaction from both sides of parents and children, thus, the visual storyboarding of this journey provides a deeper understanding of the next steps of ideation and testing. The Storyboard begins with the moment of a parent thinking of introducing money to her kid. Followed by the practices of earning and spending money. The story ends with a few frustrating moments of both sides when some issues of money management emerged.

Design and Iteration

After the second round of Usability Testing with targeted users, parents found the flexibility of the concept in experimenting and implementing their methodologies of education. They were able to educate their children both earning money and sharing responsibilities.

Children liked to see the evidence of money moving between pocket and piggy bank. They got the feeling of control

Users got interested in virtual banking accounts when I was explaining my intention on the last screen although the interaction has not built yet. However, due to the time constraint and the technical involvement shortage, Usability Testing of virtual banking was not conducted. Thus, this was planned for the next step.

My success

1. The next steps of the concept is to test and evaluate the virtual banking concept which allows parents to top up the virtual banking account and children will be able to use this tool as an internet banking to manage their accounts and transfers. A virtual banking card is an integral part of this concept. The following evaluation including:

Top-up features
Monitoring transfers

2. Parents are the one to set up their personal information for the flows of both them and their children. Therefore, the personalising feature will be evaluated with parents to ensure the accessibility

3. Moving further to build 2 interactable separated mobile apps where parents can monitor and control the children from their own phone tactfully.

And what I plan to do next

The problem can be solved in different ways. The UX design process aims to understand the users' needs and goals, discover the problem space and then come up with a solution. In this project, parenting methodologies are subjective and diverse. One of the parents’ needs is to look for a right parenting method for the right period of children’s growth, however, there are tremendous educational methodologies according to many other aspects (culture, age, personal perspective,..). I decided not to provide the educating solutions but facilitate users to experiment their methods easily and eventually still address users' needs and goals of educating their children well.

Primary users and secondary users. During the research, I found evidence of parents’ roles who design and decide the experience for their children according to what they want children and themselves to achieve. Besides, although the flows are separated visually, it requires the cross interaction from both sides. Therefore, I included parents' ideas in the process of design and got validation from them. By that way, the product will be able to facilitate their parenting effectively. Furthermore, the role of children in testing is to enhance the engagement of children and reduce the effort of parents in guiding them to use this product.

Results and Learning

Prototype link

Interesting Insights and Findings

As mentioned in the UX Strategy, apart from parents, the children are involved in the Usability Testing to be able to firstly illustrate their portrait to validate the Proto-Persona. Additionally, their insights are critical to complement the Userflow and UI design whether or not they understand and get interesting in the product.

Objectives

Validate the concept and flow with parents.The design aims to the parents’ experience of educating thus this digital product should reflect their process and facilitate them to achieve their goals.
Validate the interface design with both parents and children. Look for the understanding of children about money concepts in order to ensure they can understand their parents’ expectations easily through the UI design.

Participants

5 kids from 11 to 15 years old
2 parents

Usability Testing

Research data of Money Talks Program about “Are parents open with their kids about financial matters?. Demographic of family respondents: Parents have children at the age ranges of 8-14 years old

Survey data was conducted by Harris Poll in March 2017 about “Teaching children about money”, including 2,237 U.S adults ages 18 and older

Report about Consumer Socialization in Families: How Parents Teach Children about Spending, Saving, and the Importance of Money - George Patrick Batten, Dissertation submitted to the faculty of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Doctor of Philosophy In Sociology. Demographics of Parent and children respondents: Children at the age ranges of 12-15

References

The persona of children is based on the description of parents, thus, in this step it is considered as Proto-persona to be able to identify the users for the design and testing process. This is validated by the insights from Usability testing.