Role: UI/UX Designer, Graphic Designer
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Tools: Photoshop, Adobe XD, Figma, InVision, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap
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Team: 5 Designers, 3 Developers, 1 Design Mentor
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Timeline: 10 months

Vested is a virtual coin jar app that allows you and your friends to save money towards a common goal. It allows you to create jars where you can invite your friends and track your progress towards a goal, whether that's raising money for a trip to Hawaii, gathering money for a friend's birthday gift, or splitting the bill. You can see how much you're budgeting for a goal, how far you're away from your goal, and how your friends are contributing by keeping them accountable. Vested combines the financial and social world to build relationships with one another.

Sharing and collecting money is often complicated and opaque.

‍Money was always a hassle to deal with when hanging out, whether your group was trying to split a Korean BBQ bill six ways or get seats together on the same flight. Why not create virtual coin jars that everyone could pool their event-specific savings into in advance, keeping the headache of "who owes what" at bay the day of? And why was it that no form of an easy-to-pay-into group account yet existed?

Vested allows friends to pool their money together towards a common goal.‍

Create a jar and add friends

• Create a jar with a specific goal amount in mind or just to save up
• Add friends as contributors to see the progress made in time
• Stay accountable with other contributors

Add funds to your jar

• Add a preset amount for some quick funds, or add your own custom amount
• See your overall contribution amount as a form of accountability towards the jar's goal
• Add notes or comments for each deposit to stay organized

Cash Out

• Cash out the jar when you reach the goal
• Withdraw to the admin's bank account or in the form of a debit card for easy spending
• Archive the jar when you cash out or when the event has passed to see a history of your past spendings

What tools are young adults already familiar with?

We sampled a small focus group of 14 individuals, all within the demographic of 18-24 years old, to see what tools they were already familiar with and what their current methods of payment are. We asked about Venmo in our survey because Venmo is one of the top finance apps in the app store that our demographic is familiar with.

Survey insights

There are many other finance apps in the competitive landscape, but we didn't want Vested to be just another finance app. We did a competitive analysis to see what these apps already offered and how Vested will offer something new by combining the financial and social part of our lives.

Competitive analysis

Overall, we found that our competition had little to no aspect of managing group money and accountability.

Building off the concept of a ‘virtual coin jar’, we’ve curated three storyboards for various scenarios in which Vested serves to achieve different goals for people with different needs.

Storyboards by me, Shelly, and Kyle

Gift Funds: This is for those scenarios where a group of friends want to collect money for a gift, but don’t want to go through the hassle of making multiple transactions and paying someone back. Vested is a great way where friends can come together to collect money - say for a birthday gift - where the total amount can be used to purchase it.

Habit Jar: Like the fun yet constructive concept of a swear jar, users can keep each other accountable for habits they are trying to quit. As the funds accumulate, they can pledge to keep the money in the virtual bank until the habit is broken, at which point they can reallocate the pooled funds towards a shared activity or another goal.

Business Owner Perspective: When we usually go out and eat, we tend to do it as a group of friends. Business owners can take advantage of this and see the amount of money that group of friends have, and offer them specific deals to increase their own business. (See our Competitive Analysis later below).

Our storyboards shaped our vision of our app and revealed key screens early in the wireframing process.

From the gift funding example:
Key screens:
• Communication/messaging system
• Friends putting money into the group’s pool
• Cashing out the money

We also identified:
• Overview of user’s “coin jars”
• Expense breakdown
• Profile, creating a new goal, etc.

After putting our storyboard ideas together, we created wireframes/lo-fi prototypes to address Vested's main functionality. We created two versions of our app: a minimalistic design and skeuomorphic design.

Top: Minimalistic design by me
Bottom: Skeumorphic design by Audrey

When we tested these prototypes with our classmates, this is a summary of what we found:

‍Minimalistic design:
‍Pros:
- Clean and straight to the point
- Easy to read and navigate

Cons:
‍- Missing some heuristic features such as back buttons
- 'Add funds' button, and consistent language

‍Skeumorphic design:
‍Pros:
- Fun/playful
- Technicality made the users to click around more and test what they can do
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Cons:
- Can be hard to read initially

By taking both prototypes' feedback, we decided to combine both designs to iterate on our final prototype. We agreed to make the overall appearance minimalistic but also keep our imagery, such as our jars, as skeuomorphic. As a result, this is what our prototype looked like:

Original final prototype v1

The pace of this course went by extremely fast. After we finished creating our hi-fi prototypes, our class participated in our version of Shark Tank where we pitched our idea to "investors". Long story short, our group won first place for most creative idea and design. Our classmates saw that Vested had potential to be used in the real world, and we agreed. Since this course was only five weeks long, the end goal of this project was to simply create a final prototype. However, our team felt the need to extend this project because we wanted to see what we can do with it. Therefore, here comes phase two of our project!

Our original point of view wasn't specific enough and lacked a clear direction.

We went through a 5 week training program under UCSD's NSF I-Corps Training Program that taught us how to validate our ideas for the market, how to pitch our ideas to investors, and helped us pick a specific target audience.

Ultimately, our entrepreneurship mentor told us that we needed to be more specific. Because of this, we had to reevaluate our decisions. Okay, who are we actually targeting? How can we make this app more specific and desirable?

After intense brainstorming, we concluded that we should focus on travel enthusiasts. Why? In the excitement of planning where to go, plans often fall through because the idea of financing a trip is daunting.

Despite the challenges in switching direction and sacrificing ideas that we held onto so dearly, all this business training really stretched us and refined how we think as product designers.

How might we help young adults be more organized during the travel planning process and streamline methods of collecting money?

We conducted 20-25 interviews with 18-30 year old travelers who plan trips annually, typically with their friends.

Main pain points:
• Categorization of spending is unorganized and difficult to keep track of
• Limited visibility options for those involved in a spending group
• Discomfort with splitting uneven costs

Main user needs:
• Ability to visually see their funds, how they are split and distributed
• Collaborative goal tracking, sense of accountability

For our new high-fidelity prototype, we went with a more "familiar" look that draws inspiration from social media applications (e.g. notification feeds) and addressed the need for better data visualization.

Prototype created by Kellie

3 major improvements to the original design:

Based on our research findings, we made 3 major improvements from our first prototype, our second prototype, to the final product.

Simplified the dashboard

• While our initial jar designs were fun, we simplified the dashboard for easier navigation.
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• Users are able to view high-level information about each travel jar at first glance

Refined data visualization

• Users have the option to show contribution amounts to keep the group accountable
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• Eases the discomfort that comes with splitting uneven costs

Centralized activity and communication

• Activity history used to be in its own separate tab

• Based on feedback, each jar has its own Activity and Comments section so conversations can be centralized in their respective jars

As much as this project shifted and challenged me, Vested and this entire experience as a whole taught me what it meant to be a true designer that is open to change, bold to explore, and eager to grow in confidence and technical skill.

This project was one that pushed me the most as a UX designer, and I can say with confidence that it is 100% okay to fail and get knocked down. I had to grow comfortable with the idea that almost nothing goes as originally planned, and as important as it is to solve a design problem, it's also equally important to recognize your comfort zone and venture out of it.

TLDR: Design is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach, change is good (and be flexible), knowing about your user is important, and collaboration and communication is key.

Thank you for reading my thoughts and processes and going on this journey with me!