SOW

Hackathon Project

Sow is a gamified financial literacy education app that allows users to easily learn a wide variety of finance-related information. Users are rewarded for completing modules and quizzes.

SOW, a financial literacy concept

Throughout Covid-19, I participated in a hackathon partnered with Intuit. The primary theme for this project was financial literacy. We thought that it would be a great idea to build a financial learning app aimed at young-adults from the ages of 18 to 29 years old, as we were all young adults who have lived through similar experiences.

Responsibilities

UX/UI Design, UX Research,
Prototyping, Wireframing

Team

Colman Tsang
Nicole So
Ava Liao
Ryan Lott

Timeline

March 12 - 14, 2021 (24 hours)

How might we better equip people with tools for financial learning?

The Problem

Too many adults often lack basic financial concepts, from learning about basic investments to saving for an emergency fund. This is the result of modern education curriculums often leaving out basic finance courses due to already over-loaded course-loads. Our target with this app was to focus at young adults, an audience that is critical to building a future foundation of money and smart finances.

Research

Through our secondary research of multiple academic resources, we concluded that a teenagers’ interest is a first step towards increasing their financial knowledge and engagement. Unfortunately, trends show a different story when it comes to the application of their knowledge.

Every 3 years, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) issues a 5 question survey as part of it’s national financial capability case study. We read this study and a few others, and gathered a few insights.

FINRA Insights

In 2021

69% of those age 18-29 feel anxious when thinking about their finances.

Only 30% of those age 18-29 have tried to figure out how much they need to save for retirement.

EVERFI Insights

Challenges

Current curriculum is already heavy on students.
Hard to implement, as its new content for teachers to learn.
Financial literacy is a tedious and boring subject for students.

CNBC Insights

Teens aged 15 years old in the U.S. ranked 8th at best and 12th at worst amongst 18 participating countries in an international financial literacy study.

Competitive analysis on similar apps

United States Mint
Learning Site

Capway Finance

NatWest Rooster Money

Lots of self taught lessons
Varied by age and topic

Plenty of finance products to learn
Curated learning articles

Has lots of general resources and tips
Good to help keep a budget

Pros

Outdated designs
Incohesive experience

Offered as part of their own banking product
Difficult to sign-up for a personal account

Limited features on free version
Built primarily as a budgeting app

Cons

The Process

We started ideating by throwing random ideas out and brainstorming what would be the most feasible product to create within our 24 hour time frame. This led us to analyze the prompts further and build out the timeline and screen requirements.

Building our goals

1Create a working prototype that taught users about financial planning, through a gamified approach

2Design modules that a user would learn through videos, summaries and key-points for each topic

3Implement quiz sections that allowed users to earn coins for the gamification

App Requirements

Through our research, we realized that we needed to cover a wide range of financial topics, and offer a gamified approach along with quizzing capabilities for our minimum viable product in our showcase. We then broke this down into specific screen outlines and product requirements.

Personas

After understanding what we needed to build, we wanted to further describe our potential users and understand them better. Through using our own anecdotal experiences with finance and our secondary research, we compiled personas that we thought would closely resemble our user group.

Branding Guidelines

Even though this project was for a hackathon, we wanted to develop a shared understanding on what we all wanted the app to roughly look like. Implementing this rough template with working-guidelines was useful to keep us all on track.

The first iterations, wireframes

Feedback from mentors

We utilized these wireframes to get feedback from our mentors. Our main goal was to show functionalities along with basic layout of the app.

Changes to the progress bar

Sectioning off the bar made it visually easier for users to differentiate between sections.

Error screens

This helped notify the user’s incorrect actions and helped correction through positive messaging.

Exploring the changes, high-fidelity mockups

Home
We wanted the user to be focused on their progress on each module.

Profile
Users could change their settings here and find friends to learn with.

Store
The earned coins through modules would be used here to purchase items.

News
Daily curated financial content would be shown to the user here.

Pre-Module and Module Learning Screens
These two interactions are the core interaction methods for a user to learn from.

We incorporated videos, summarized video points and key definitions. Helping the user learn quicker through chunking the content into digestible pieces.

The Impact

The final result is an app that we built towards catering a younger generation, but still allowed anyone who wanted to use it the ability to do so, with a colorful, clean, and easy to navigate UI. We got to present this project to the Intuit panel of judges which was wonderful, but unfortunately we didn’t place first with our app.

I’m still very proud of the work that me and my new friends were able to produce here as it has provided me with valuable experience working with different people from different industries.

Working under time constraints

As one team member had a different time zone compared to the rest of the team, we had to work around her time schedule and adapt to it. Additionally, the 24 hour time limit that we had was a challenge that we had to deal with too, as we tried to schedule our working around taking breaks.

Creating MVPs and working with tight deadlines

This competition gave us a prompt that we had to work towards, and this forced us to come up with an idea, research, develop, and implement the idea, in a short amount of time. This pressure helped me focus and narrow down on what is needed to be done each and every hour.

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