Hello!

I have been working to make a payment screen that is a simple, yet engaging experience that gives people the information they need in order to make a contribution decision towards someone else’s goal. I was able to streamline quite a bit from last week, and so Charles and I had a lot to talk about today. 

Our conversation centered around the idea of alignment. Do the actions within the app align with the mission and goals of what I am trying to do: namely change behavior around savings habits. As such, we spent a vast majority of the hour or so we met talking about the payment action.

Feedback from my prototype suggested that users’ conscious decisions to give someone money was valuable because it reminded them in a very tangible way that they were helping a friend (or themselves) with a specific goal. In many ways, this daily action provided users with immediate, positive, and social feedback that they need to overcome the difficulty in saving. On the other hand, the daily contribution reminder forced them to take conscious financial action towards one thing rather than another. Not only does this have the potential to become burdensome, but also (for better or worse) makes them aware of the financial choices they are making… which also might become a hinderance to engagement.

So Charles and I began to talk about the advantages and disadvantages to making this action automatic - as most other savings programs have done. There seems to be something important about giving people the choice to contribute so as not to put them in a situation where they have “over-saved” but also so they can take ownership over the action. It is something that they did. On purpose. And with purpose. And while that might be difficult, it seems that there would be a greater sense of accomplishment at the end knowing that you took very conscious steps to achieve something rather than having that “something” (being the achievement of a savings goal) just happen for you.  The question becomes though, how difficult does this become and at what point does it just need to be easy?

So that is a problem I will be working through in the upcoming weeks. The other “aligning” question that we have begun to talk about is how to align a potential business model to the user experience. This is something that has been lurking in the shadows of my research, prototyping, and design for the past 6 months, but one I have not really felt ready to address until… well, now. And “ready” is a relative term. But I think that in order for this to be a viable solution to a savings problem it has to have an awareness of the business limitations and opportunities. Which in the payment world, are immense and complex. By which i mean “immensely complex.”

This afternoon I had a great meeting with Allan and he gave me some fantastic feedback. He was enthusiastic about my idea but encouraged me to create ways for users to be more opinionated and involved in their teammate’s goals. This was an shadow of an idea that I had discarded a long while back because I didn’t want my product to become just another version of Svpply. However, as we talked, I began to see it not so much as a way to curate purchases, but a way to be involved in your teammates’ goals. As Allan put it, how could you NOT contribute to a goal and not comment, advise, offer suggestions or input into what you are helping to finance?

If someone is saving money for a series of date nights with their spouse or partner and you are in a group with them, why wouldn’t you want the opportunity to give them recommendations or help plan their first date? If another friend wants to buy some woodworking tools, but you suggest that they change their goal to a series of woodworking classes so that they can learn which tools they would use the most. I had a message feature built in, but I think this small twist will make a world of difference in the value that the product can provide to all types of users.

Allan also encouraged me to spend a lot of time boiling my service down to the essential components - three bullet points that encapsulate the “need to knows” about how to interact with it. I had heard this feedback before, but never felt like I had a plan of attack on how to accomplish it. He gave me specific, actionable steps - which were incredibly helpful.

Lastly, he told me to have fun. This was perhaps the best advice of all. I’ll be spending the next week, cranking out a new set of wireframes around expanded use cases, prototyping the messaging features, and culling the concept down.