Earlybean Product Design

Overview

Earlybean helps parents raise money-smart kids.

Using the Earlybean mobile app, parents can create and manage interest-earning custodial and checking accounts for their kids, allowing them to engage in active and passive learning as they earn, save, invest, and spend responsibly while partaking in financial literacy lessons.

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Problem

There is a huge gap in financial literacy for kids and teens.

Financial literacy is something parents and guardians often neglect, with the false hope that the schools will teach it, or the child will instinctively pick up the skills as they grow older.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way. Kids aren’t born with money skills, because nobody is. Nobody picks these things up without guidance and direction, be it a frugal parent or a skint friend.

Design

Build a user-friendly fintech app for busy families.

The app should help their children and teenagers spend and save their pocket money better, grow their savings, track their spending, partake in active financial literacy lessons and learn how to master their finances, in a fun and engaging space while also allowing parents to create and manage interest-earning accounts for their children, set allowances, oversee their children’s spending and load money for emergencies or for when they’ve earned it.

Roles and Responsibilities

Product Design, Visual Design and Brand Strategy, User Experience Design, User Research and Product Development, defining revenue model and messaging look and tone.

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Users and Audience

Earlybean’s users are children and busy parents/guardians who have financially dependent families.

Earlybean is designed to help children and teenagers manage and learn money skills while allowing parents to set up recurring allowances for their children, keep track of their spending and help them on their journey to becoming financially literate.

Scope and Constraints

The platform needed to allow users to do the following:

• Create an account or sign-in (for existing users)
• Automatically detect whether a user is a child or an adult
• Assign child wallets to children
• Assign guardian wallets to adults

User Goals Breakdown

Child User goals:

• Receive a regular allowance from parents/guardians seamlessly
• Earn compound interests and extra income by completing activities both at home and within communities and for good behaviour
• Track earnings from pocket money or allowances
• Save towards specified and unspecified goals
• Get gamified financial education
• Request for funds from their parents for specific needs

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Adult User goals:

• Open family and child accounts instantly
• Schedule automated recurring money transfer to kids for allowances, chores and compound interests
• Setup incentivized allowances 
• Track child’s allowances 
• Monitor child’s spending
• Get access to financial education resources
• Set earning, saving, investment, giving and spending goals on family and child accounts

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Process
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‍Discovery

I started by researching similar products like GoHenry to compare UX flows, feature sets and interaction choices.

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User Research

We created two user research surveys, each targeted at our two broad sets of users, children and adults, and conducted open-ended user interviews in tandem with a select group of potential users to further understand user pain points and empathize with them. 

We utilized the findings of the primary and secondary research to better understand the personas of our potential target segment, define our brand strategy and decide which features were most needed so we could implement them in our MVP. 

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Cross-section of some responses from the child-focused survey:

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Outcomes

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Screens from the final design

Here are some screens from the final product

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A high-fidelity prototype of the mobile app was created using Figma

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Next steps?

• Continuous user research 
• Feature expansion
• Improving the user flow

Future Features

• Advanced financial products for older children
• Digital currency (BeanCoins) functionality
• Digital Cards (BeanCards) functionality
• Peer interaction with finance centric games and messaging

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Learnings

The surveys we conducted during our user research phase in product development were very vital in helping us gain empathy and deeply understand the unique needs and critical pain points of each of our user categories.

I gained a deeper understanding of interesting ways to design interfaces that cater to multiple user experiences with wildly different goals within one context. Having an iterative mindset also helped as I designed several versions of the products UX, improving it with each iteration based on user testing and feedback.

Also of note is the better understanding I now have of the critical importance of effective UI gamification in attempting to keep children engaged in educational features. ‍