Mint: Gamifying Goals

Product Design Case Study
September 2019 - December 2019

Background

For about everyone, saving money can be extremely stressful and seem impossible. Many lose motivation throughout the process, and spend the money elsewhere. Its become extremely easily to become demotivated, especially when the current financial apps are stationary, one sided, and not engaging. To combat these problems, our goal in this project is to 'gamify' the Mint app, by extending and redesigning some of its features.

A little money saved periodically can go a long way.

At some point, everyone experienced having a flow of income for their first time. For many, it can be overwhelming. But as time goes on, we all realize that a little effort done periodically can go a long way. Suddenly, with a bit of effort day by day, big purchases seem possible.

Our project aims to minimize the stress and maximize the motivation by gamifying and simplifying an essential part of our lives: finances. This will hopefully allow people, who are lacking experience in finance, to have a more inviting and easygoing experience when saving up for certain goals.

Throughout this project, we worked in a team of 3 to contribute towards User Research, Low to High Fidelity Prototyping, and UX product design in order to extend and redesign the Mint android app features. I learned immensely from working in a team environment in a field I had little experience in. My biggest input would be within the Design and Prototyping process, where I contributed towards gamefying the system as whole and creating the first prototype integrating finances with the achievement system.

Research Goals and Findings

We started our process by conducting user research through surveys in order to gain initial insight of the problem. With the data insight from our research, we were able to determine next steps and a path forward in addressing the pain points for our target users.

Our team sent out a online Google Form survey to popular UCSD Facebook pages and received responses from 32 people. We figured the best way to move forward was to collect information from survey questions. With survey questions, we can collect information at a larger scale on a very sensitive topic.

The research led us to the following conclusions:

Many of the answers converged, and brought to light many problems that people face when trying to save. From the more interesting statistics, about 67% of the survey participants believe they have good control over their money; however, very rarely, do they commit to large purchases through periodic saving.


To continue our research, we underwent a competitive audit on apps with similar features that we could use to draw inspiration from. All the financial management apps including Mint lack a strong source of motivation for the user. Enter, the achievements system; Duolingo’s system for making language acquisition fun has inspired us to extend it towards Mint. With an achievement system, users would be more motivated and would have a more enjoyable experience saving and achieving their goals. In addition to that, Digit and Qapital Banking gave us insights into what it takes to budget for different goals in parallel, another thing that Mint is lacking.


Problem Statement

Young students especially those who are interested in personal finance need to be more motivated when using personal finance apps in order to promote a more active effort towards saving money.


User Profiles

To further our understanding of the problem, and how it may be fixed, we developed fictional personas in hopes of identifying user needs and pain points.

Tim

Tim is a freshman in college, who’s worked several part time jobs while in high school and is planning to continue doing the same in college. He tries to save up his earnings towards some big goal, whether it's Coachella, a phone, or a gaming system. However, in many cases, Tim usually loses motivation and forgets the importance of what he's been saving up for.

Goals
Motivations

In order to build his dream computer, he needs to buy multiple expensive parts with varying priorities. A CPU and GPU are his top priorities, and he’s likely going to get a new monitor as well.

  • Eventually buy all parts to complete his goal of building a computer
  • Track saving progress across the many different parts
Frustrations
Vera

Vera is a sophomore in high school, who has no experience in finance or budgeting. She had just gotten her first job, and blew her whole first paycheck while impulse spending. After being lectured by her parents about her sudden large expenditure and the debt she’ll incur, she decides she needs to figure out a way to manage her money more responsibly.

Goals
Motivations

Would like the ability to save for her future student loans, and get more accustomed to saving periodically with a goal in mind.

  • Learn to manage money better
  • Avoid buyer’s remorse
  • Don't get lectured again
Frustrations


Design Process

The design process began with low-fidelity paper prototypes. This allowed us to quickly have a prototype to work with in order to receive early feedback and therefore improve on features.

We then used the paper prototypes on users to test out the UX flow, and gain insight on the features and their implementations.


User Testing


We user-tested designs all throughout the construction of this prototype in order to accurately pinpoint the changes that need to be down before committing to a high fidelity prototype.

We separated our prototype into specific pages that need to be built. Throughout the building of this project, we built multiple versions of each page, and presented it to users for evaluation and feedback. This proved to be immensely helpful, as it helped us keep note of the specific things users like when navigating around the app.

In many cases, we ended up combining different aspects of the different versions, in order to improve the user experience:

Two different versions of the 'Add Goal' page converging:


The final “Add Goal Page” was a combination of the two alternative screens that we proposed. We decided to replace the “required fields” section with an asterisk to denote required fields. The notes bar was increased in size per user feedback. In the end, the result allowed us to blend simplicity by keeping it all on one page, enhancing the user experience by creating a clearer form of communication between the app and the users.

Two different versions of the 'Goal Details' page:


Per user feedback, we adjusted the goal details page to be more visually appealing. Sections of the graph were color coded based on progress, and we increased the weight on the line in order to make it easier to see and draw more attention. Two summary statements were added to give the user a better understanding of their saving progress. The functionality of editing and deleting were also added to the page to allow instant edit and delete access to the user.

The above highlight the importance of building up from low-fidelity prototypes, as we were able to catch on the issues that would otherwise be troublesome when missed by accelerating towards a high-fidelity prototype.

Final Design and Reflection

After testing and learning from both the UI Sketches and Paper Prototypes, we were able to come up with a high fidelty UX flow that tightened up the visualizations. Designing in higher detail allowed us to finalize the smaller details and visual aspects of each of our pages, the flows between them, and the user’s interaction as a whole. All in all, this project was geared towards improving the lives of students when it comes to financing and saving up.

By reducing the size of the steps forward throughout the phases of this project, we were forced to be articulate with one goal in mind: the user experience.

Below is the final design, along with our notes on each of the pages.

Goal Overview Page

Goal Details and Saving History Pages

Achievement Pages
Reflection

With this final prototype, there are still problems that are yet to be tackled. First, a link between Mint's finances and the Goal Saving feature will allow this feature to flourish above other Goal Saving oriented apps. Second, a design improvement can be done towards the goal saving feature by providing the user with different presets on savings processes. All in all, with these additions to the Android Mint app, we hope to have successfully integrated a goal saving feature that coincides with the current app's functionality and UX flow.