Grind Mobile savings app
- UX Design
- Research
- Prototyping
Grind is a savings advisor and micro-investment wallet that assists university students in managing their income and helping them save for long-term wealth.
Roles & Responsibilities
User Research: Competitive Analysis, User Interviews, Persona Mapping, Journey Mapping, Empathy Maps.
UX Design: Sketches, Wireframing, Prototyping, Usability Testing.
Project Context
Duration: 4 Weeks
Personal Sponsored Project
Tools Used
Figma
Miro
Google Sheets
College is expensive! Between tuition, housing, food, and others, many undergraduate students rack up debt that will take years to pay off. But it doesn’t have to be that way! The app focuses on students saving for a long period of time and can only cash out on the day of graduation. This money will be a support or even capital for students who want to start their personal business. This would help students save money even while they are in school.
Problem
Without the proper financial understanding and stability, life after college can be difficult. Graduates are left with nothing but peanuts to survive on because they have no source of income to support their hopes and objectives. But it doesn't have to be this this when technology can help.
Goal
To create a smartphone application that will assist students in saving money while still in school. Only after graduation may they cash out the money they have saved over a long period of time. It would serve as a source of support or perhaps financing for students who desire to start their own business.
Solution
Wallet Safelock
- Allows Students to enable a safelock while saving their money till their set matured date.
- Gives Students the option to choose how often they want to save (Daily, weekly, monthly) and how much they want to save in those periods.
- Gives the Students a fixed interest on their funds depending on the period of time they set.
Flexible savings
- Allows Students to save their funds and withdraw anytime they want. This is for students who wants to have full control of their funds.
- Students get to manually save the amount they want on their Jaiye savings plan.
- Students still get a fixed interest on their funds depending on the period of time the saved funds spends in the savings plan.
My approach
Research
User segmentation
The users were segmented into groups using frequency. They were;
- The Savers (Students who actively save)
- The Newbies (Students who want to save but don’t know how to)
- The Doubters (Students that don’t believe in savings at all)
Focus
I focused on the Newbies group because they are more scalable and the friction between them and the other groups is minimum.
User Interviews
The user research assisted in learning more about the people who will be using the product. I was able to identify user needs, goals, and behaviors using Google Forms, which influenced my product and design decisions. However, after receiving the required responses from users, I proceeded to use the miro tool to analyze the feedback I received, which assisted me in identifying specific problems that users face, a solution to such a problem, and a feature that is appropriate to solve such a problem while designing the app. The research was also beneficial in determining the feature flow, information architecture, and user flow.
I gathered a lot of user pain points, demands, goals, emotions, and concerns, but I'll share some of the highlights with you here so you can get a better sense of my design thinking and process journey.
- Saving culture : A large majority of pupils are unaware of the notion of saving money.
- Investment : A scarcity of business ideas to help you get started when you graduate from college.
- Inconsistency : Inconsistent with setting away a set amount of money and how frequently to do so.
- Motivation : The majority of people do not have a consistent push or incentive to save.
Pain points
Inconsistency
Users find it difficult to save due to unrestricted spending on unforeseen expenses.
Confliction
Users' conflict when it comes to setting their own financial goals.
Poor saving methods
Users' impulsiveness about how much of their personal income to set aside while still in college.
Financial Background
Users do not have a lot of experience deciding what kind of business to start after they graduate from college.
Competitive Analysis
This competitive analysis gives me key insights into the attributes, features, flows, and emotional reactions elicited by my competitors' design solutions. You can purposefully construct your solution to make a better quality product and/or experience by understanding these aspects of competitors' products.
User Persona
Journey Maps
The personas and empathy maps helped us outline an hierarchical task analysis, which we then used to make a journey map highlighting the pain points and the opportunities for improvement.
Design
After sketching different iterations, designing the low fidelity to mid fidelity prototypes and doing a mini usability session. Thankfully, the app was going to serve its purpose. Then, I advanced to the high fidelity prototypes.
Iterative Designs
Splash and Onboarding screens
The Onboarding screens introduce the users to the Grind app, It basically summarizes the whole application in three screens. From the first carousel that tells them ‘Save now, enjoy later’ to showing them that when they save, they get returns in form of interest. And lastly the users see that they can learn how to save. These screens are important because they get the users excited before they actually use the app. They get that excitement to use the Grind app.
The other screen is the language screen where the users can pick the language they understand as to use the app better.
Registration screens
The first screen is where users input their university email to verify their student eligibility. This ensures that only university students can create an account with the Grind app. Then they get a four digit code sent to their university email which they use for the verification. Lastly they get to input their personal and contact information which is used to help them create their accounts.
Inputting their matriculation number was excluded, I felt that It might intimidate the students as it is a sensitive information.
Mobile Dashboard
This is the mobile dashboard where users can perform quick actions on their account. As seen above, users can toggle between their seperate accounts; the total and Japa savings. Users can also perform quick actions like funding their wallet, creating new savings plan, adding a new debit card and withdrawing their funds.
They also get to see their recent transactions on their dashboard. I designed this mobile app in such a way that most of the services the users might need is easily reachable and accessible from the home screen/ dashboard. Users can toggle through the navigation bar, from home to plans to cards then finally to their profiles.
Creating a savings plan
When creating a new savings plan, users get to pick between the locked or jaiye savings plan. The locked savings plan disables withdrawal until the funds reaches its maturity date. While the Jaiye savings plan gives the users control over their funds; save and withdraw anytime they want. When detailing the plan, users are asked to name the plan, how often they want to save and when they plan on cashing out their funds.
After inputting their preferences, the savings plan details are summarized for the users including the fixed interest rate given by Grind. Then they can confirm the creation of the plan by clicking the CTA.
Adding Card and Bank Details
Users need to add their card details for deposits, which the app automatically helps them deduct it based on the frequency they chose. And also they need to add their bank details for withdrawals. Users als have access to their activities, their deposits, withdrwals e.t.c
Evaluation
To evaluate this prototype, I conducted a moderated remote usability study with 10 participants spanning across University students from different regions in the country. This was followed by a qualitatitve survey that asked participants to describe their thought process while performing the tasks.
Here’s a brief of the process;
- Explain the concept behind the app to the users.
- Ask them to perform benchmark tasks one by one.
- Prompt for feedback after each task regarding what went well, what did not.
- Analyse testing findings to find patterns within data.
- Iterate designs based on new insights.
Usability testing can reveal design flaws that would otherwise go unnoticed. When you observe how test users behave while attempting to complete tasks, you will gain critical insights into how well your design/product works. Then, you can use your newfound knowledge to make improvements. The findings of this study are summarized below.
We gathered a mostly positive response to the prototype. Participants were able to perform the benchmark tasks with ease, and the survey allowed us to obtain qualitative data about user's thoughts while using the app. Here are a few highlights from the results:
85%
Users believe the Grind app will be a useful tool for saving their funds.
60%
Users believe the Grind app locked savings would help them improve their spending discipline.
90%
Users believe the Grind app learning resources would be a great help for them.
Take-aways
- Importance of UX in every project: Taking the user research, usability study made me realise there’s no good UI without UX. A great product is fetched from a brilliant User experience.
- Enlightenment: Users need to be enlightened and informed of new developments in their surroundings. Users should be educated about the importance of financial literacy in the modern world.
- Satisfaction: I feel satisfied and happy that I was able to solve this problem, It was evident in the usability study how the users were applauding the project. They felt the change. This mobile application can solve the financial problem of most university students..
Thank you
