Designing a family-friendly finance app

Oink was a startup looking to launch a payment app for kids

The Context

In a kickoff workshop, we learned that Oink was a startup with technology patents that enabled kids to make purchases online in a COPPA compliant way. 

What they needed was an app, a strategy for user adoption, a monetization strategy and a design system. My team and I led the strategy, research and UX.

We started with research

We needed to learn about our audience: kids and their parents, and their behaviors and opinions around finance. Our goal was to get quant and qual data to be able to find insights that aligned across both. So we did:

  1. Two focus groups with parents

  2. Two surveys of 1,144 total parent respondents

  3. Ten 1-on-1 interviews with kids 8-17

We learned that parents want to help their kids with finance, but don’t know how

They were at odds with their kids: kids just wanted freedom, and parents wanted their kids to learn how to develop smart habits.

Through personas, we revealed the different mindsets that parents had

For our product, we wanted to give analytical parents analytical tools, while enabling more values-oriented parents to teach their kids smart financial values.

Our key insight: the app should focus on being a teaching tool to help parents, not a payment tool for kids.

We’d originally thought that the app should focus on kids. But we realized parents were our core audience. They were going to drive adoption, and promising to bridge the disconnect between them and their kids was our biggest opportunity.

The app featured various learning tools

Parents had a lot of flexibility. They could set their degree of control, could opt-in to incentives and competitions around saving, and could encourage delayed gratification.

Users could track purchases and balances

The product included features like account transfers, shows spending history and sends notifications to parents if the child makes certain purchases.

The most complex part of the app was the purchasing function. The app had an in-app browser where kids could purchase from specific retailers, of their parents’ choice.

For kids, we enabled purchases

Where’s the app now?

Soon after our launch, the company changed hands and now is called REGO. They still have an app in-market.

I’d love to hear from you

Email me at andrewturrell@gmail.com to chat about a role or project. I’m open to full-time or freelance.