[4] Feedback and Brainstorming Session

April 12th — April 16th

April 12th : In-class notes

Cash cow brainstorming ideas

We continued to brainstorm our systems based on the goals we set last time: helping students track money and achieve monetary goals. Sometime during our conversation, we were inspired by the term “cash cow” and thought it would be novel and engaging to brand our system with cows. For example, when users achieve a long-term goal on the, a bottle of milk (physical product) will be sent to users as a tangible reward. This helps make long-term goals feel more tangible with a physical, periodic reward. Additionally, we imagined that this milk bottle will include money saving tips and material that will encourage users to keep saving.

We built a joint pinterest board to give us a sense of cow-related typography, colors, and moods.

Feedback from Stacie

After talking to Stacie, we realized that the scope of our solution was still quite broad and would be difficult to flesh out in only five classes. Stacie suggested we think about how to make students more aware about an aspect of managing money. Also, considering the scale and time limit of this project, it would be better for us to focus on one aspect of money management and do not set our goals as “changing other’s behaviors”, but to bring a certain aspects of their expense to light so they may choose to change their behavior. She also reminded us that some students are not necessarily accumulating money to save, but are cutting back on certain expenses. This prompted us to conduct research on our audience to understand more about their money managing behaviors.

Survey

We sent out a survey to the CMU student population to gather insight on how they manage money.

To understand more about our problem space, we sent out a survey to different CMU student facebook groups and social media. We asked questions related to students’ spending habits, saving methods, and spending goals.

From our survey, we learned that people generally know that they are spending a lot of money but do not know how to effectively take care of it. Some methods of saving money either involve stashing away money or making plans to save that do not always follow.

April 13th Meeting notes:

The survey found that 88% of respondents spend money on eating out. This helped us narrow the focus of our goal to helping student manage the amount of times they are eating in and out with friends. We categorized the social eating events to eating out, eating in, grocery shopping, and drinks. Since students are saving money, another goal we have is to help them save up for exciting goals. Our overarching goal is to help people get into the habit of saving money and have a stronger sense of their cash flow.

Presentation

Before meeting together, we prepared individual type sheets and color palettes. We decided a rounded, san-serif typeface (like Nunito) would be more suitable for our project since we are targeting college students and want the branding to feel inviting and exciting.

The three medium:

1. Digital: Because it would be most suitable for us to make a tool, we decided to make an app. In the context of spending for socializing, a social network type of app would be very appropriate to serve our purpose of communicating people’s financial goals with friends. For example, if you want to only eat out 3 times this month, you may post it on your profile, and friends can look at your availability and arrange a time with you. If on your profile, you already used up your “eat out” plans, your friends will know that you’ve already spent your budget and maybe consider eating out with you next month or just grabbing a coffee with you. This would help avoid many unnecessary expenses on socializing.
2. large physical: After a long discussion of the large scale physical medium, we decided to make this “stage 1” of our process. We thought it would be fun to plan with your friends collaboratively, and having a physical representation may fell more “real” and fun for the users. The user will be presented with various chips representing different spending activities, and a container with different rows, each represents a day of the week. You may plan out your activities, calculate your budget, and take the chips home to remind yourself with the goals.
3. small scale physical: This part works in tandem with the large scale physical. The chips that you bring home are actually magnets for you to collect your receipts (on the fridge). (we are not completely sure, or they may be tacs). If you use up your magnets, (which means you’ve reached your spending goals), there won’t be more space for the receipts. They chips are carried in a carton.

We prepared our presentation for next class.