Case Study: Children’s Pay

Mobile app for pay management

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During our first week of bootcamp my colleagues and I had a great challenge. We were presented with several heuristic cases, divided into teams and each team chose a case.

Our team chose the heuristic case of pay.

Time limit for the project was 5 days.

Briefing

“We want an application to manage the pay for children between 4 and 7 years old”.

As our briefing said, our client asked us for a digital product to manage the allowance and allow parents to control it with total tranquility and comfort. To this, the client added that he would like to be able to differentiate the two profiles, children and parents who manage the child’s pay.

Role

As this was our first project, we decided to help and support each other. So, between all of us we made and completed the tools at our disposal to carry out the project.
When presenting our project, we defended it as a team and in a coherent way.

Research

Our first objective as a team was to get information on the subject, since we had several questions in mind such as :

1. Do children under 7 years old get paid? Is the right age between 4 and 7 years old?
2. Would such a young child know what pay is?
3. What do parents think about pay?

We completed our Lean Survey Canvas document, super excitedly prepared our survey and interviews, and launched into our search for information.

We quickly realized that the questions we were asking were not the right ones, as some of the information was a bit incomplete. We also found it a bit difficult to reach our target audience, it was too specific. So, we iterated several times over the document.

In the end, there were less than 50 surveys collected and we managed to get between 12 and 8 interviews between all the members of the team, which provided relevant data to the study.

1. Most of the adults said that they considered giving the allowance to their children once they began to have a more social life, such as going out with friends in the neighborhood. Therefore, the initial ages considered (between 4 and 7 years) did not fit.
2. Parents or guardians used the payment as an educational tool, not only for financial education but also to reward or punish them for their actions.
3. Parents or guardians had the need to know what the children spent their allowance on for fear of misuse or inadequate use of the allowance, and that therefore they would not learn or value it.

After collecting this information, we continued to search a little more because we needed to confirm the data. And we asked ourselves the following questions:

1. What is pay?
2. In which countries is it common? Or rather, which countries have a culture of “pay”?
3. What do child psychologists think?

All this, together with the data we obtained made us move forward and take the next step, to complete the Lean UX Canvas.

Lean UX Canvas Tool

Thanks to all the information collected we were able to complete the Lean UX Canvas document in order to better focus the problem, analyze the user benefits of the application, find solutions and create our hypotheses about the product or problem to work with.

Like the Lean Survey document, this one had several iterations as we had to go back to it several times.

Empathize

In this phase, we put ourselves in the shoes of the tutors and the children using the Empathy Map tool.

Then, seeking to channel the design of the solution to the problem posed, we used the results obtained in the Empathy Map and developed a User Persona of the users, in this case for both children and adults. Thus, Alicia and her son joined our “ranks”.

Next, we performed the User Journey of both User Persona. At that moment, we saw very clearly the situation based on a typical weekend for both User Persona, and the Pain Points that these entail plus the real solutions that we had to give to these points.

Define

At this point, we decided to focus on the user who would be the guardian or parent and we organized all the information available to us by making an Affinity Diagram.

Afterwards, we consolidated the path in the process since with the Lean UX Canvas and the User Journey defined, we had the product and the solution on track.

Ideate

As we organized the information we turned our attention to the two highlights of everything we knew and solved them:

1. Create a history of children’s income that can be accessed by multiple users such as parents or guardians.
2. Method of penalties that can be controlled by adults to educate children. This method was modified in a more positive direction after several tests with users, so that, instead of basing it on penalties, we based it on the achievements that the children accumulated and for which they deserved their reward, i.e. pay.

Prototype

After having everything clear, analyzed and organized, each of the team members made a Crazy8, which we then explained and presented to the rest of the team in turn. In this way, we reached a conclusion and definition of how would be the most optimal interface for the user.

This prototype needed to iterate and be modified after some tests we performed on several possible users to be as shown.

In the prototype we show:

• Profile registration: The process of creating a new profile as a child.
• Income: Income history of the child.
• Weekly goals: Creation of new tasks assigned to a child or child with economic cost with respect to the pay.
• Achievements: History of achievements completed by the child.
• Summary: The current status of the child’s pay.

Next Steps

Of all the improvements that we proposed within the team for our MVP, we considered the possibility of registering a credit card type purse, in such a way that the economic transaction of the child’s pay would be facilitated through this card and the parents could be kept informed of the steps being taken with the pay through the application. This improvement would solve in a more complete way the management problem that parents or guardians feared, since it would allow them a more exhaustive control.

Another improvement that was valued, in relation to the previous one, was the fact that for those children who started to receive the payment and were younger, they sometimes lost the coins. Therefore, taking up the issue of the coin account, we thought about the development of a digital bracelet connected to the application that would allow children to make payments with their paycheck money through contactless.

Learning

Beginnings are never easy, but there’s a first time for everything. And the determination and motivation of our team was amazing.

With this project, we learned iteration after iteration how to handle the new tools we were taught, such as the Lean UX Canvas, Empathy Map, User Journey or Affinity Diagram. In addition, we learned how important it was to give good feedback, the importance of teamwork, empathy and problem solving among others.