Next Step: Storyboarding
Welcome back for our second development update! This week our team worked on deciding the key idea for our app.

Forecast this week: Brain Storms
During our meetings this week, we shared many amazing ideas for our app. We discussed in depth the many pros and cons for each idea: the novelty, implementation, downfalls, and more. It was so amazing to see everyone voice their passions in app form, which made it even more difficult to decide which app to pick. After a very close vote, the “Invest in Your Friends” app idea came out on top.
In one line: This app would be a virtual coin jar between friends towards a common goal.
In a bigger picture:
As a smartphone society we’re constantly trying to reinvent ways to communicate with our friends that are both convenient for us and engaging for them. Social applications are arguably some of the most lucrative — four of the top five free apps in the Google store today are social apps (Messenger, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook). There’s a lot of overlap in the functionality here, mostly communication through text and communication through photo/video.
I saw Vested (working title) as a medium to engage friendships in a way more steeped in reality — through money. Its three branches of objective as an application lie in (a) budgeting your money for social activities, (b) goal setting and follow through, and, of course, (c) making plans and reaching out to your friends in a way that means something.
Credit: Audrey Olson
With such a great variety of personalities and passions, it is difficult to have everyone 100% on board, but we went home to sketch out our storyboards and personas. We hope that after our next meeting we will either find the merits and the weaknesses in this app idea and move forward from there.


Ambitiously moving forward with our “Invest in Friends” project, we’ve finalized the name of our app: Vested.
Before we dived into our storyboards, we decided it would be a good idea to choose our final logo for our team, and this is what we came up with. And with that, the polished version of Koalafied was born!

The team reconvened prepared with a series of storyboards and personas for potential Vested users and the various set of problems this particular app will solve for them. This process allowed us to individually brainstorm and gain a vision for Vested and how it could be a fun and practical addition to the dynamics of a social group.
Building off the concept of a ‘virtual coin jar’, we’ve curated storyboards for various scenarios in which Vested serves to achieve different goals for people in different situations with different needs. In doing this, we were able to not only envision the usage and needs of the app, but also further conceptualize the idea and better understand what it aspires to be in order to effectively (yet simply) help its users achieve their goal.
The following are a few rough personas/storyboards our team members sketched out:
Gift Funds
This is for those scenarios where a group of friends want to collect money for a gift, but don’t want to go through the hassle of making multiple transactions and paying someone back. Vested is a great way where friends can come together to collect money - say for a birthday gift - where the total amount can be used to purchase it.

Travel Savings
Budgeting for a trip with friends has never been easier! Here, a young web developer and her boyfriend put money from their respective paychecks into their joint Vested coin jar with the hopes of saving towards a romantic Hawaii getaway.
Poker Money Pot
Hosting a small event that requires a money pot is easy with Vested. Users are able to invite multiple people through the app and see in real-time who has paid into the pot.

Habit Jar
Like the fun yet constructive concept of a swear jar, users can keep each other accountable for habits they are trying to quit. As the funds accumulate, they can pledge to keep the money in the virtual bank until the habit is broken, at which point they can reallocate the pooled funds towards a shared activity or other goal.
Business Owner Perspective
When we usually go out and eat, we tend to do it as a group of friends. Business owners can take advantage of this and see the amount of money that group of friends have, and offer them specific deals to increase their own business.
Activity Planner
Having money is one thing, but deciding how to spend it is another. Vested strives to make the lives of its users a little simpler, by providing an in-app voting system for deciding upon a group activity.
After we gathered all our personas and storyboards, we put them all into a slideshow to present to the class.

Before we dive into Week 3, the main thing on our agenda for next week is to create lo-fi prototypes of our apps to actually see how users will interact with our app and become ‘vested in it (*ba dum tss*). A supplement to that is creating sketches of our own portfolios. We’re excited to see how Vested will be coming to life! Thanks for reading!
Koalafied out.

