Jul 2017 - jun 2018

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, etc. 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.

motivation & Background

Vested started off as a project for COGS 187A: Usability & Information Architecture for the Summer of 2017. For the course, my teammates and I were tasked with discovering and designing a novel application. We worked through the process completing need-finding, user personas, story boarding, paper prototypes, user research and testing. Finally, we presented our findings and our final product in a Shark Tank like pitch competition. Our professor, the TAs, our peers had the opportunity to then “invest” in our future.

At the end of the course, I had enjoyed working with everyone on my team and I thought the product that we were working on refining together was pretty neat. So I looked into how we might continue working on Vested. Our professor, Dr. Mary Boyle agreed to be our adviser and enthusiastic cheerleader.

The next quarter, we joined the NSF I-Corps program at Rady Business school to further develop our idea under the mentor-ship of experienced business people. After admittance, we received $1,000 to validate and build our prototype.

Here is a brief overview of our journey from coursework to fledgling startup:

problem & need-finding

Young adults (e.g. 18-30 year olds) in our society are a large population of people who like to engage in many activities that involve spending money together such as traveling, splitting the bill, buying gifts, etc. However, many of these activities require a variety of means to communicate, to plan, and to keep track of expenses and statistics. But what if you needed an easy way to manage spending with your friends?

solution

We saw Vested as a tool for people and their friends to manage their savings in a different way. Instead of saving a stock portfolio Its three branches as an application lie in (a) budgeting your money for social activities, (b) goal setting and following through, and, of course, (c) making plans and reaching out to your friends in a way that means something.
Vested allows you to create a pool of money with your friends to track expenses, to see who is contributing, and to cash out the money when you and your friends reach your goal.

Personas & Story Boarding

Personas and Story boarding helped us explore different use cases for our solution that we can keep in mind while we develop our prototype.

Paper Prototypes

We developed paper prototypes to quickly get feedback from our peers on the usability and workflow of the app. We realized hat the intended use of the app wasn’t clear and concluded that we would need to improve wording or

WIREFRAMES

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

When we tested these prototypes with our classmates, this is a summary of what we found:
Minimalism 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
Skeuomorphism design:
Pros: Fun/playful, technicality allowed the users to click around more and test what they can do
Cons: Can be hard to read initially

prototype iteration: Hybrid

In our next higher fidelity prototype we combined the intuitive and fun design of the coin jars with the practicality of data rich graphs and straightforward display of current progress.

FIN

This concludes most of the work on the project (we did continue conducting further research and developing rough prototypes).

This project gave me a lot of experience in developing and iterating on a rough idea. It also made me realize that it’s up to me to take an idea further and with enough planning and effort, we can achieve a lot. It also taught me a lot about project management and how to create realistic goals to keep your team on track to meet major milestones.