Banking Company
Empowering teens with financial literacy through mobile banking
PNC BANK
Project in brief
Teenagers face critical financial decisions yet remain an underserved demographic in the finance industry. PNC Bank asked us to come up with a better way to engage with them.
Many parents can't introducing their teens to banking since they are unable to adequately explain finance themselves. We designed a digital service that created a safe environment for teens to learn about banking and experiment with money. With parent-controlled debit cards and an accompanying app, we balanced teens empowerment with parent oversight.
My Role
Service designer and user researcher
Timeline
7 weeks, completed on January 2018
Team
4 Design Students
The Solution
How the service works
THE APP
For the family to spend together
Teen Views
Parent Views
Process
Research
Cash is king when it comes to teens
To understand financial conversations teens and their parents have, we interviewed 12 teens and 5 parents.
To no one's surprise, we found that for PNC to offer any service for teens, parents have to act as a point of entry and a mediator to the education.
Research Findings
Defining the audience
Using personas to summarize what not to solve for
To scope our projects to focus on a subset of problems we found out during our research, we created a parent and a teen persona.
Testing concept ideas
Speed dating ideas help to define the boundaries of an 'acceptable' service
To test what was needed by our audiences, we created storyboards and tested them with passersby on the street. [add finding here]
Iterating on the interface
Banking on the basics before experimenting
We tested our initial wireframes to see if users felt confident in the banking app. After building the information architecture, we started prototyping the learning center and finance curriculum.
Finalizing the service
Investing in learning
Interaction Design
Independent yet Connected
I mapped a parent an teen flow highlighting where communication or notifications are essential, especially between the two users.
Design decisions
The details make or break the experience for teens
Map the physical and the digital clearly with a skeuomorphic card
We clearly mapped the card balance to the physical card because teens needed tangible artifacts. Additionally, parents wanted to make sure that the teens understood the link between digital and physical spending.
Push relevant information through a personable companion
Teens wanted guidance when interacting with money. They did things that they believed was financially responsible— like keeping receipts— without knowing why. We named the app Pocket Pal after the personable character deliver information and notifications along the teen's journey.
Incentivize learning for teens by unlocking spending potential though classes
Teens have a learning center in the app that offers bite-sized financial information. As the teen progresses through the lessons, they unlock spending potential set by their parent.
Design decisions
Oversight is the name of the game for parents
Give parents a quick overview
Parents wanted to know in which categories their teen spent money. This screen provides an digestible summary of teen’s daily spending. When teen passes the limits set by the parent (eg. spent too much money in Fortnite), parents receive warning. The total amount spent by the teen is easily accessible to the parent at all times.
Give parents control through spending limits & notifications
Parents wanted to have oversight over their teen’s spending, especially during the early days of using digital money. The parental controls enable them to granular restrictions.
Provide ease when transferring money
All of the parents we interviewed preferred card over cash for daily spending, but children still received cash. Pocket Pal provided the ease of digital banking.
reflections
Bringing together a full understanding of a service and an accompanying app was a learning process
This project received positive feedback from PNC Bank executives that reviewed our final ideas and they were really interested in how the characters could be helpful.