Rapid Design Thinking: An ATM for Kids
I don’t have kids personally, but I was one once. And I remember how special my money was to me. Despite this, I never learned how to handle money responsibly, or how to use the ATM without overdrawing (a lot). Learning about money earlier in life could have prevented lots of heartache for me (and my bank account).
Kid-centric ATMs could help create little finance-literate children who grow up and know that they can only use the money they have. What a concept!
Empathize
What is an ATM? ATM stands for Automatic Teller Machine. Users can access bank funds, make a deposit, withdraw cash, and check current account balances. ATMs are created to be a more convenient way to manage money, and can cut out a visit inside the bank. ATMs symbolize our cash potential.
Why would a kid use an ATM machine? Although kids don’t have “real” jobs, they have a few ways to get cash:
- Allowance: it’s a common occurrence for kids to make money by doing chores around the house, or helping their parents out in some way.
- Birthdays and holidays: there will always be those family members who are a little unsure of what to buy for a kid, making cold hard cash the most obvious gift.
- Kid-size entrepreneurship (AKA hustling): for those money-hungry kids who need more, they’ll usually look for more entrepreneurial ways to make a dollar, such as creating a local lawn business or setting up a lemonade stand in their neighborhood.
- Random handouts: kids are cute, and sometimes adults respond to that cuteness with some pocket change. I’ve been known to pay my niece 50 cents to pose for the camera.
How would a kid use an ATM machine?
- Deposit or withdraw money: is mom finally taking you to target to get that new pack of Pokemon cards you’ve been waiting for (that’s still a thing right?)? or is there a totally cool new app you’ve been saving up for? Kids have to have money to make their own purchase decisions — unless they’re cool with mooching off their parents forever.
- Check savings: how close are they to their savings goal? That new scooter is only going to be cool for so long.
- Financial Knowledge: kids may not see the importance of this off the bat, but it’s something they’ll appreciate down the road. For this reason, financial education would need to be built in subtly.
What are the features a kid may need in an ATM?
- Accessibility: growing kids come in many sizes. I’d want to be sure that no matter their height, they can easily access the ATM.
- Easy-to-understand Interface: within the ages that come with the “kids” demographic, their levels of understanding can differ from each year. The interface of the ATM must be understandable to a wide range of ages.
- Parental Visibility: in order to make sure the financial knowledge spreads past the ATM visit, parents need access to their kids ATM usage patterns to have conversations around financial responsibility.
- Cash and Card: many purchases that happen now-a-days don’t involve cash, so kids will need a way to purchase digital items. However, most of their money intake comes in the form of cash and (the increasingly rare) personal check.
- Goals: for kids, saving money is usually driven by specific goals. Giving them the big picture of how good savings practices can get them to their goal will promote better savings habits.
- Incentive: let’s be real. Kids need good incentives to do much of anything. Hence where the allowance comes from in the first place. The ATM should offer incentives in the form of additional money for good financial practices.
Define
Now that we know what features the kid’s ATM should have, let’s figure out how those will manifest on the actual machine.
- Touch screen: the user can touch any place on large screen to tell the ATM how high/low to present the on-screen content.
- Digital purchase credits: instead of cash, the user can choose to get a bank card that can be used for digital purchases, like a gift card that can be used on any digital platform.
- Engaging interface: the interface must be simple to use and navigate.
Ideate
Here are a few quick sketches that give the first few steps to their first bit of life.
Prototype
Future Iterations
This kids ATM has a lot of legs, so I feel it would be appropriate to also have a smartphone app as well as desktop site that goes with the ATM. That way, kids could potentially prepare for their visit to the ATM.
An app would give them a more real-world approach to managing money.
I think the parents could also have an app version (either within the same app or a different app entirely) to have the ability to incentivize their children’s saving habits, or any other positive habits they see.