Greenlight

July 2018 – October 2018

Project Overview

Greenlight, a debit card management company, wanted to develop new features on its mobile application to increase customer engagement and break into the financial education field. Greenlight sought to gamify its app with a new Greenlight "Challenges" feature and develop a "learn & earn" program for parents to reward their kid's self-education.

My Contributions

As the lead designer on this project, I conducted design thinking workshops with stakeholders to rapidly prototype an experimental feature for the Greenlight app. I also interviewed potential users and created interactive wireframes and user flows based on my findings. In addition, I was also asked to iterate on Greenlight's debit card redesign.

Motivation

Greenlight provides debit cards for kids that are managed by their parents. The Greenlight app allows parents to track their kids' spendings and allocate money into their accounts. Greenlight wanted to experiment with some new features to increase user engagement with their app – beyond the simple money management aspect. These were their goals:

Engagement and re-egagement
Financial education
Gamification to increase interaction with their young audience

Competitive Analysis

I began the project by looking into existing products in the market that were effective in meeting one or more of the above goals. I wanted my research to answer the following the questions:

Will our product accomplish the goals that we set?
Are there similar products on the market? What do they do well? What don't they do well?
How might we change the game for financial education?

Some of the products I examined:

I rated each of these products on Game-ification, Learning, and Engagement. Here are the overall key takeaways from the analysis:

Learning: The quality of content is very important. Products that are more education-focused do a better job of teaching. Video lessons are very effective.
Gamification: Products that diverge from traditional multiple choice/quizzing formats are more fun for the user.
Engagement: Tracking progress through a game or lesson helps the user measure their advancement. Notifications keep the user re-engaged. A social aspect such as a leaderboard is nice for the user to engage with their peers.

User Research

Purpose

Understand the user’s motivations, behaviors, and expectations.
Put ourselves in the user’s shoes, eliminate our biases and expectations as the creators
Provide a solid foundation for the rest of the design process
Use qualitative research methods to challenge our hypothesis

What We Knew

What We Asked

What We Learned

Below is the demographic data that Greenlight provided to our team.

Children learn about finances informally, mostly from real-world experiences. However, there is a lack of real-world experience for learning things beyond their age (Eg. investing, budgeting, taxes).

Parents would like for there to be some sort of formal learning. Some suggested a mandatory finance class taught in school or games where kids could have a large sum of imaginary money to spend and manipulate. Parents also wanted access to tools so that they could teach their kids themselves.

User Stories and User Flows

Based on my findings from the research, the stakeholders decided that they wanted to experiment with incorporating a "Challenges" feature to the Greenlight app. The basic idea was that parents could assign their kids a "Greenlight Challenge" which would involve a financial lesson followed by quiz questions. Upon completion of a Challenge, the kid would receive a monetary reward deposited into their Greenlight account.
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I took to the whiteboard and ideated user stories and user flows from two perspectives: how a parent would interact with the app versus how a child would interact with the app.

App Map

I also created an app map as I was prototyping in order to visualize the navigation from screen to screen.

Interactive Prototype

The "Learn" tab contains all of the Greenlight challenges. In the quiz flow, when a child misses a question, they will have the chance at the end of the quiz to retry the same question until they get it right. This helps them remember concepts that they find difficult.

Debit Card Redesign

After the initial project, I was also asked to rapidly iterate on a redesign of the Greenlight debit card. This led to many fun variations, from vertical cards to cards that allowed for custom images.