How a pocket money experience can create money-literate children in a cashless society
You may have heard about Danske Bank’s latest product launch — a pocket money app for children. At Hello Group, we are very proud to have worked closely with a team from Danske Bank to make this project come to life.
This article provides a small peak behind the scenes into what is essentially on the surface a quite simple solution, but with solid discoveries and insights about children, parents and money.

Unlike other pocket money apps, what makes this unique is that children get their very own debit card. Children can see when their pocket money is paid, how much is on their account, track their savings, and see what they’ve spent their money on.
Although we didn’t see it as a pocket money tool. Teaching children the value of money is a universal parental task. But what happens when we try to convey the value of money to children in a world where cash is disappearing from everyday life? We started looking at what the frictions of being a child in cashless society were. What is their reality, where do they want to go, and how can we bridge that gap?
So before we even ended up with an app, we had to make sure we were building the right thing, and not just building the thing right.

Understand why we are building, what we are building
In order to understand what we are building, we need to understand the purpose. The purpose is the core idea that unites and controls the project. It’s the purest form of the design’s meaning. At its core, it’s about finding out what change we are going to create and why it matters.
We formulated a purpose for the project that we could all agree on. Something that obviously took some polishing, but it acts as a guiding star and helps with our design decisions:
Financial empowerment of children in a cashless society, will not only come from having a steady flow of money, but from an understanding of how money behaves and how to make smart financial decisions.

If we build it, will they come?
It is always a matter of asking ourselves — “If we build it, will they come?” Meaning, how do we make sure that what we build is so meaningful for people, that they would want to use it? (I can highly recommend reading Aylin Kanpak’s article Don’t let your UX blinders fool you for more about this topic). In fact this mindset is inherent to everything we do at Hello Group, and it starts with a thorough discovery phase. The emphasis on discovery as opposed to research here is because in research we tend to seek something specific, whereas in discovery we are open-ended in what we’re trying to find. We are looking to be surprised, and to find something we potentially did not know.
The quality of the insights determines the quality of the outcome
In this case, it started with really understanding the world that children and their parents navigate in, and what their main frictions and wants are. Because the quality of the insights determines the quality of the outcome. If the solution is not based on human insights, you could end up designing a solution that people won’t even use.
So what did we discover you might ask?

A tough crowd in a complex world
What we learned is that children are a much tougher crowd than adults, and their world is infinitely more complex. They are truly digital natives, their expectations are incredibly high, and they have fundamentally different needs. No matter what or who they engage with, they seek experiences that make them children. We wanted to create an experience that shows that we respect and trust children. The only way to do that, is to look at what it is that makes them children.
Our target group is children between 8–12 years of age, but there are huge cognitive differences in each year of a child’s development.
Children have a limited perception of time and that influences their engagement levels. So we needed to create small successes to grab their interest and keep them engaged.
Did you know that children laugh 300 times a day, and adults only 20?
So we had to make a money-matter into something that is also fun and engaging to use. But without making it too much of a game experience, because they have to understand that it is still real money.Children expect to see the results of their actions immediately. If nothing happens, children become easily frustrated and leave. So we needed to create an experience with feedback and guidance as well as the feeling of “I did it” whenever they complete a task.

And when it comes to money, things get even more complex
Money is part of the grown-up world, and to children that is exciting. But money is also an abstract concept for children. Just consider how you would feel if this was your reality:
- Your salary is unpredictable and unreliable at best
- You don’t know how much money you have
- You also don’t know how much money you can spend
- But that doesn’t really matter, because you have no way of spending the money you have
- And even when you have money, you never know if someone’s going to take it
Sounds like fun? This is the world children manoeuvre in.
On the opposite side of the scale, the adults try. They really try
It’s not much easier for parents who juggle with their own challenges and rationales.
- Inherently parents just want to keep their children safe
- Parents want their children to be independent BUT in a controlled environment
- Parents don’t want to let their children down over something as simple as pocket money
- Parents teach children about a world they know will change
- Knowingly or unknowingly, parents pass their habits on to their children
So we rounded everything up that we found in our discovery, and thematized those into three different groups, which then helped us inform our design principles. We could always go back to these insights and see if what we designed was true to our human insights about children, parents and money.

From insights to narratives that define our experiences

At Hello Group we want to delay going from insights to features as much as possible, because that is when things tend to become locked down. Writing experience stories is a tool we use to describe a narrative for the experience that we want to create, which can then be used as a spring board for ideas to solve a friction or enhance an experience.
The challenge when working with clients with a fixed budget, scope and expectations from stakeholders is to constantly push the boundaries of how far we can go with a particular experience in order to make it a loveable experience. This is the product owner’s MVP vs MLP dilemma. (to read more about this, I can highly recommend reading Lars Damgaard’s great article The minimum viable product (MVP) comes with a maximum of confusion)
Clients tend to ask “When is it viable enough?” We would like to ask “When is it loveable enough?” If it does not qualify as a minimum loveable experience, we have to push harder. Ideally we want to push the experience even further, beyond the minimum experience, to strive for the ideal delightful experience. As product owners and advocates for the humans using the product, it is our responsibility to keep the ambition level high, even if it involves taking a few battles with the client from time to time.

A solution that fulfills the needs of children and parents

As you can see, the pocket money experience has to encompass many different needs. If you really simplify it, we could boil it down to — children want autonomy and parents want control. So we had to juggle those two different motivations and ask ourselves — how much control should parents have, before it affects the experience of the child in a negative way?
But essentially the main motivation is still about creating a reliable flow of pocket money and to teach children about money. The only way they can learn is to have access to their money, and be able to save up and spend it. Children learn through trying out and experimenting. And only through personal experiences, failures and successes will they become money-literate human beings.
At present, the app is a version 1.0— and we can’t wait to see all the ideas, that came to life during the project rolled out as more updates are released for the app. We hope both children and their parents will be delighted to use the Lommepenge app.



