Money Fitness for Credit Unions

Overview

In order to break into the US market, ieDigital wanted to present some innovative concepts to the American Credit Union market. We had three months to understand the market, come up with some concepts and design and build a concept which would be presented at Finovate Fall in New York.

Analysis

We spent the first couple of weeks looking at Credit Unions and finding out what set them apart from banks. We also looked at articles, and a documentary series on credit unions in the UK from the BBC. The main thing we realised is that credit unions were built around a sense of community, either through a common industry like the military, or a geographical location. We thought of other sites that also had drawn upon this sense of community such as Just Giving and wanted to bring the same sense of community into finance.

Hackathon

A year earlier we had an internal company hackathon. One of the ideas that came from that was an intelligent money spending tool which would monitor your spending to see if you were on track to keep within your savings limits.

Personas and Customer Journeys

Taking those ideas we started drawing up a persona, and some customer journeys. We divided the experience into three user journeys. The first one is allowing the customer to get hold of their finances when they have a negative cash flow by setting spending goals. The second allows them to save any spare cash using a 'Shake to Save' feature. The third allows them to use any spare money to contribute to local community projects.

Prototyping

We used group brainstorming to help sketch out the user journeys, then took those into Adobe XD. We first wire-framed up the screens, then layered the visual design over the top. We could then go from wireframe to prototype to visual prototype efficiently with a small group of people and could export in a format that helped the developer.

Script

In parallel the script for the demo was written and we worked closely to align the demo with the script and worked in an iterative approach to get the timing of the demo right and that it put the right message across.

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