User reseach

Week 5 class

Today we did alot of drafting and planing for our presentation. By doing this it forced us to refine our concept and make things more succinct. By doing all this we found some missing gaps that we needed to fill in. We also further developed our short elevator pitch and tried to turn it into an "essence"

Initial Digital Pets

This morning I went through and mocked up a couple of my initial drawings on Adobe Illustrator to see how look on screen. At this stage we are looking at making the game for kids, hence why the illustrations are quite basic and childlike.

The idea of having a whole bunch of different pets allows us to cater for a bunch of different users, make it unique, and also allow for different savings plans.

For example, the Squirrel might cost $20 to buy up front, with a daily cost of $1 a week to pay for his acorns and water. However, the elephant might then cost $50 up front, with $2 each day for his food and water.

This allows for people to 'play the game' and save at their desired pace. Some people might want to save a lot of money, and can therefore either choose more expensive pets, or buy multiple pets. Others that are a bit more conservative and only want to deposit a dollar or so each day, or maybe even less, can choose the cheaper pets to look after.

- Blake

Mind Over Money – Episode 5

How do you help kids be better with money?

The episode was based around finding out what kids know about money, and what they think about the concept of money. What the know can affect them for the rest of their lives.

Although claiming they had a good understanding of money, the younger kids seemed to struggle with questions such as:
• Where does money comes from?
• How do people make
• How does money get onto the card?
• How does the bank get money?

Nigel Latta got them to play a little game as some research. He asked them to place an emoji that they would use to represent 'MONEY' as if it was a person. Some of the kids showed an understanding of balance and wealth, by mentioning how it is bad in some respects as it makes a difference between 'rich and poor families'

They are already beginning to form strong opinions of money. Important questions that Nigel Latta asked are:
• "If you don't start talking to your kids about money, they'll just start making stuff up. So when is the right time to start talking to them about money?
• "When we give our kids pocket money, it's one of the first times that children have to try and get their heads around the idea of money, which is why we often get so stressed trying to figure out how to make them better with money"
There were some super interesting experiments that Nigel Latta conducted, playful ways on gaining research into how kids value and spend money.

There was one super cool way of showing the effects of saving through compound interest, where they used big containers of water being filled up to show this. The young girl would save '$10' per week, while Nigel would then go and pour in equivalent to 8% of her interest each year. She stopped 'saving' at the age of 20, after depositing only $520 a year, and by the time she was 65, she had made around $500,000 because of the addition of compound interest.

Another one was to see how kids are tempted by money. Each kid was given $5 to run around the fair and play on bouncy castles, get popcorn, balloon animals etc. However, if they decided against it, Nigel Latta would double whatever they had saved. So if the kid didn't spend anything, and had $5 left, they'd receive another $5. It was quite a cool way of showing them the value of saving and how saving money can actually lead to earning more money on top of that.  

- Blake

Mind Over Money – Episode 3

Why do we spend money we don't have?

I found this episode incredibly interesting to find out how people value money, and how they actually look at it.

Nigel Latta looked at a couple of case studies around people that spend money and become in debt, and their struggles to then get out of it. I found it surprising that collectively, the debt of New Zealander's adds to over $6.3 billion.

Once again, there were some cool experiments conducted for research. It appeared that when saving money on a product or item, our minds think of the percentage we are saving rather than the actual price. People would gladly save $5 on a coffee if it meant walking 50 metres down the road, although when it comes to buying a car for $18000, the idea getting it for $17995 just down the road doesn't really appeal to us. At the end of the day, they're both $5.

My favourite part of the episode was when Nigel Latta got out his team 'NUDGE', and went undercover to stop Courtney impulse buying in Countdown. His team were placed throughout the store at points where Courtney would impulse buy, cakes, chocolate, chips etc. Each one of them would need to stop her buying the product. 

They used excuses such as
• "We aren't selling these they're past their expiry date"
• "Sorry we've just had broken glass smash so it's a health hazard, we can't sell these chips"
• "Sorry the donuts aren't scanning, the barcode doesn't work"

It was intriguing to see how frustrated Courtney was getting during each stage, and once the barcode hadn't scanned, she even ran back to the bakery section to grab some more to try it again. It proved just how strong of an impulse she has when it comes to buying these unnecessary desirables.

- Blake

Doodles

Brainstorm

Journey map

Sketching Virtual Pets

Attached below are some initial sketches looking at styles. Each of us sketched up a page of different animals to find which sort of style we wanted to go for.

By Monday, I'm going to mock up a couple of these in illustrator to see how they'd look in digital form.

- Blake

Interview questions

Business Canvas / Social Enterprise Canvas v1

As a group we gave both the Business and Social Enterprise Canvases a try. To be honest it was a bit confusing to start with and both documents contained a lot of jargon that we had to Google to get our heads around. We felt that the Social Enterprise Canvas was more suited to our project as it did not focus on money and profit, whereas for the Business Canvas we ended up repeating ourselves throughout the document multiple times which was confusing for us.

Research and Inspiration – Digit.co

During our research, we found an existing app named 'Digit'. It's an app focused on helping people save, without the hassle of transferring money themselves or worrying about how much money they've got in their account. 

https://digit.co/

Every day, Digit checks your spending habits and moves money from your checking account if you can afford it. You can easily withdraw your money at any time. 
It acts as a smart way to save money, and show each user just how much money they can save without realising it.

Our idea is going to look more into gamifying saving money, and turning it into a fun experience. We want the user to be educated on saving and be aware that they are saving as they play the game.

- Blake

Initial Research

On designing mobile games that hold people's attention:

http://blog.proto.io/how-to-design-a-mobile-game-so-addictive-its-almost-irresponsible/

• Make it look and feel great from the first splash screen.
• Make sure the onboarding experience is absolutely perfect.
• Keep testing, keep iterating.
• It’s All About the Reward
• Make sure it's responsibly addictive.
• Addictive Mobile Games Begin With Killer Prototypes

On competitors/other solutions to the problem:

https://www.asb.co.nz/banking-with-asb/clever-kash.html

ASB Bank has a solution to children's banking and saving in an increasingly digital world, with an elephant toy that displays their savings bank account balance on it's tummy. Kids can swipe coins off their parent's banking app toward their toy to transfer money across to it.

This video shows how it works:

We think that our solution would be more immersive, encourage long-term saving of money, and make kids want to save, more so than a toy that loses it's fun after the first few turns.