Project Description

Keep is an iOS application to help people save money for their goals by skipping small purchases. Users can record when they choose to not spend money on an everyday expense (coffee, cocktails, clothing, accessories, etc.) or when they deliberately save money by choosing a cheaper option, for example by taking a bus instead of a cab. As they see their savings add up, users can feel good about these decisions and enabled to buy the things that are important to them.

I explored the problem in depth in a Medium article when we first released our iOS app. 

Project Timeline - April 2014 to September 2014

Process  

In April 2014, our team of five people was formed and given the grand challenge of finding 10 million new customers for Mint. The team chose to focus on trying to solve some of the financial problems faced by millennials, since user data indicated that Mint was not currently meeting the needs of this group. 

We began by interviewing dozens of college students and recent graduates, talking with friends, and observing our own behaviors when it came to spending and saving money. An insight that quickly emerged from this user research was that saving for short term goals, such as going on a trip or buying a new computer, was top of mind but challenging for most people. Everyone understands that saving money involves changing daily habits by avoiding unnecessary purchases, but there is no reward system in place for encouraging this behavior change. Thus people easily fall off track and end up sacrificing larger goals by spending all their money on things such as eating out, getting daily coffee, or shopping.  

We decided to design and build an app to help motivate people to save for their goals and stay on track. The team did a number of brainstorming and rapid prototyping sessions to go broad on possible solutions and test any assumptions we were making as we came up with these solutions. 

After generating a broad range of ideas and solutions we took some of those ideas and created click through prototypes that we tested with users. We also ran an experiment where we sent a daily text reminder to save money to a small group of testers. The simple reminder proved to be valuable to some of our testers as a way of encouraging good daily habits. From all of our tests we concluded that simple solutions with good design can be incredibly powerful and so we decided to build Keep. The fundamental interaction in Keep is "tap and hold to save". We created a simple interface for revealing a beautiful image while you record amounts of money that you save throughout the day. 

The project ended in September 2014 when each of the team members moved on to new teams and projects. Keep was in the App Store from August 2014 to July 2015, and was eventually taken down because there was no one to maintain it.

If the project had continued, the team was excited about figuring out how to build money movement in to the app so that when a user "saved" an amount of money, that amount would transfer from their checking account to some sort of savings account specific to their goal. We had also started exploring adding a social component to Keep so that users could see how their friends or other users were saving money and stay motivated to save.

My roles

• Lead front end & interaction developer

• User researcher

• Product manager

• Product designer

About the Team

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