Christine Seed
Christine Seed
UX and UI Designer | Visual Communicator

Wintrust Bank | Mobile Banking App | Spec Project

How can parents encourage their kids to learn financial responsibility, create savings goals, and manage their money?

Overview

Wintrust Bank has been working for years to provide financial literacy to customers as they promote long-term habits with money that will benefit their customers and their families. The bank has realized there are a lot of parents finding different ways to educate their children on financial responsibilities, and the company is seeing the need grow this segment of their customers.

What we did

We completed an end-to-end UX process to understand, ideate, and prototype what users (both parents and kids) needed from a financial banking app. This included interviews and user testing with both parents and kids (ages 12-18), feature prioritization, wireframing, UI design, prototyping, and more.

Project Overview

Three week sprint

Team of four UX designers

Creation of a new app concept

My Role

UX research

Wireframing

UI design

Tools

Figma

Adobe Illustrator

Trello

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1. Discover

  • User interviews

  • Review of business

  • Comparative and competitive analysis

We started by gaining a clear understanding of what the bank was currently offering, what their competitors were offering, and what users were looking for.

User Interviews

The first thing we did was talk with parents and kids. We wanted to understand what families were currently doing in regards to managing money and how interconnected (or not) parents’ banking was with their kids’ banking. To narrow our focus some, we decided to target kids ages 12-18 and their parents.

Why?

After some research, we concluded that children ages 12-18 were ideal for this app because, in general:

  • They still live at home / with their parents or guardians

  • They are old enough to start earning money either by allowance or through employment

  • They are young enough to not have had much financial independence

  • Their parents have the opportunity to teach financial responsibility during the middle and high school years

 

Parent interviews:

  • Conducted with five parents of kids ages 12-18

  • We asked about their current banking and financial apps, how they talk with their children about money, and what types of financial values they want to pass on to their children

““I am looking for ways to teach my child about financial responsibility.””
— Parent Interview Quote
 

Kid interviews:

  • Conducted with two kids ages 12-18

  • We asked about how they make and manage their money, if they talk with their parents about money, and also about what types of learning apps they like and why

““I know it’s bad, but as soon as I get my hands on some money, I spend it.””
— Child interview quote
 

Analyzing our research told us that parents and children want more collaboration around financial matters.

 
 

Parents want their children to learn financial responsibility. Parents cited wanting to teach their kids in a way that they themselves were not taught. Budgeting, investing, saving, and giving were all cited as key financial values parents want to pass on to their kids.

Allowance is the main way parents give their children money. Sometimes this is tied to chores and sometimes it isn’t. Parents sometimes forget to give it, or have a haphazard way of tracking it. Children often spend it quickly and without much planning or foresight.

Both parents and children found the idea of shared saving goals appealing. Children were excited at the idea of saving enough to buy something they want, and parents were interested in helping their children learn to save through incentives, communication, and working together.

Kids are eager to ditch the piggy bank. Kids talked about not wanting to deal with physical cash and coins and found the idea of keeping track of their money online very appealing.

Review of Current Business and Exploring What’s Possible

In reviewing the current business, we found that Wintrust’s app is very limited. It performs the basic banking functions of checking account balances but very little else.

To get a sense of what was possible, we conducted a thorough comparative and competitive analysis where we examined 11 different financial and banking apps. Eight of these were general apps and/or geared to adults, while three were specifically aimed at children and teens.

 

The existing Wintrust app doesn’t have any family functionality.

Key takeaways from current business review and the comparative and competitive analysis:

  • The current Wintrust app doesn’t have any functionality beyond basic banking.

  • Apps provided incentives for saving money.

  • Apps automated allowances and had the option to tie to chores.

  • Apps provided financial education.

  • Some apps provided UI inspiration.

 
 
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2. Define

  • Personas

  • Problem Statement

  • How Might We Statements

  • User Flows

  • User Journey Map

 
Taking what we learned in our research phase, we wanted to further define what we were looking to design and who we were designing for. The creation of John and Kyle, a father and son duo, was our first step. After we empathized with John and with Kyle, we ideated around how to solve for their pain points and put ourselves in their position as users of the app.
 

Personas

Parent: John

"I want my children to learn the value of money, but there has to be an easier way than lecturing or writing things down on a piece of paper."

Noteworthy Behaviors
John gives Kyle allowance but has to write it down on an Excel sheet to keep track of it. His own spending is very organized but he has no idea what’s happening with Kyle’s money.

Needs and Goals
John is looking for ways to teach Kyle about financial responsibility. He also would like a way to transfer his allowance electronically.

Pain Points
John’s current financial and banking apps don’t allow him to automate Kyle’s allowance. They also don’t provide any financial education tools for Kyle. Whenever John tries to talk with Kyle about financial matters, Kyle gets annoyed.

 

Child: Kyle, 15 years old

“If I saved, I could buy things my parents wouldn’t buy for me.”

Noteworthy Behaviors
Spends money as soon as he gets it and has a lot of trinkets to show for it.

Needs and Goals
Kyle is very interested in saving up for a guitar but goal feels out of reach. He also wants his dad to be consistent about giving him his allowance.

Pain Points
All of Kyle’s money is in cash which is hard to keep track of and also makes him feel like a little kid with a piggy bank. He is tired of his parents meddling and wants to feel more control over his own money.

 

Our User Personas led us to our Problem Statement and two How Might We Statements.

Problem Statement

Parents need to educate their children on financial responsibility, however Wintrust financial company currently does not offer the tools to facilitate this.

How Might We? (Parent)

How might we automate the process of parents giving their kids money?

How Might We? (Child)

How might we make saving and other good financial habits fun and engaging for children?

To further define how we would go about solving these issues, we conceptualized a digital ecosystem for both John and Kyle. A single app that would have one interface for the parent and a different interface for the child.

Loop #1

Parent: Allowance (Transfer)
Child: Chore (Earn)

Loop #2

Parent: Monitor savings goal, transfer to the goal
Child: Create and contribute to the goal

Parent Side of the App

What we did:

  1. Three User Flows
  2. User Journey Map
  3. Sitemap (IA)

Features we decided on:

  1. Account monitoring
  2. Shared savings goals
  3. Transfer money (either with or without allowance stipulation)
 
““We’ve started giving them an allowance, but they need to remember to do the chores.””
— Parent User
 

One of three Parent User Flows
User goal: Change child’s biweekly allowance to $10 and turn on the savings plan option.

Parent Journey Map
The parent assigns dollar amounts to certain chores and pays child’s allowance accordingly. Child completes chores, earns their allowance, and both parent and child are happy.

Sitemap of Parent’s Side of the App

Child Side of the App

What we did:

  1. Two User Flows
  2. User Journey Map
  3. Sitemap (IA)

Features we decided on:

  1. Account monitoring
  2. Shared savings goals
  3. Earn money (through chores, allowance, or Money 101)
 
““Having a shared saving goal with my parents would be awesome.””
— Child User

One of two Child User Flows
User goal: Complete a chore and direct money into savings.

Child Journey Map
Wanting to make some money, child remembers there are chores on the app that are tied to dollar amounts that they can earn. Child checks the app, completes the household chore, and earns some money.

Sitemap of Child’s Side of the App

Our goal was to design an app with two user interfaces. The app would enable parents and kids to collaborate around financial matters.

3. Design

  • Sketches

  • Wireframes

  • Prototype

Through an iterative process of sketching, wireframing, and building out prototypes, our app evolved. Our style decisions were impacted by our user research, principles of good design, and user testing.

Some of our screens changed very little throughout the process

Some of our screens changed quite a bit

Final Prototypes

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To understand how users navigate through the prototype, we conducted six usability tests in round one and five usability tests for round two.

4. Deliver

  • Usability Tests

  • Prototype Iterations

  • Style Guide

First round of usability tests

  • Tested our lo-fi prototype with four parents and three kids

  • All seven users were enthusiastic about the concept of the app and indicated they would likely use something like this

  • We identified several usability issues with the app including overwhelm with busy pages, confusion about where to click, and difficulty in understanding certain words

““Maybe it needs some sort of fun aspect to it.””
— Child User
 
““This transfer page is very confusing to me.””
— Parent user

Second Round of Usability Tests

  • After addressing many of the issues raised in our first round of testing, we did another round of test

  • We tested our hi-fi prototype with three parents and two kids

  • This round was significantly better than round one, with very little confusion and clear/easy task completion

““The use of the pictures really helped me visualize what I was doing.””
— Child User
““I love the Family Goals section - I like that it has a picture and I love the percentages.””
— Parent User

Recommendations and Next Steps

 
 

Build out the Money 101 component in the child’s side of the app. Create a section of the app that teaches children about financial responsibility while also making it fun. Research learning apps and prototype ways to incorporate elements of video games, social networking, and online learning principles to the financial lessons parents want their kids to learn. Bonus! Include optional incentives for completing Money 101 lessons that could be either financial (ie, earn $5) or experience (ie, earn a movie night) driven. We believe this would greatly enhance the child’s experience while also supporting both the child and parent goals.

Build out the investment capabilities. Parent users cited investing - both teaching kids about investing and actually making investments - as important to them. Through creating a more robust investment component of the app, we could encourage parent users to guide their kids into understanding more about how financial investments work, while also giving users real-time feedback about the returns on those investments. Coupling actual investment opportunities with investment education will promote investment literacy for both kids and their parents.

Explore ways to get kids up to speed with basic financial terms. We found in our user testing that some kids weren’t familiar with even the most basic of banking terms such as interest and investment, or that they didn’t understand the difference between, say, a checking account and a savings account. On the child’s interface, building out a Help Section, an FAQ, or using smart tips could be one way to address this. Research ways to personalize the experience so that these tips disappear as the child user becomes more fluent.

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