: Building a budgeting app thats kinda fun

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Case study: Building a budgeting app that’s kinda fun

Transcript of : Building a budgeting app thats kinda fun

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Case study: Building a budgeting app that’s kinda fun

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We all work to avoid this

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So we got a call to do something a bit

different

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Flickr Credit: London Permaculture

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“We want to do something that helps people in these crappy times -- a budgeting app that actually helps them with their money”

Flickr Credit: London Permaculture

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Personal budgeting ≠ fun

Challenge #1:

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but Mint isn’t in Europe

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Apps make us do the hard work

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Apps make us do the hard work

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Don’t ask people questions they can’t easily answer

Obvious general principle #1:

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I don’t have a favourite athlete!

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Ignore categories people can’t easily change

Project principle #2:

Flickr Credit: infomatique

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The big idea:

Forget your mortgage, think about those coffees

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Our design principles• Low effort to use

• A bit of fun, but not totally frivolous

• Give actionable results

• Focus on a single-visit use

• Make it worth sharing

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• Discretionary

• Frequent

• Easy-to-calculate

• Provocative

• Widespread

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Initial theme:

riffing on the Irish Catholic thing

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Sketchy wireframes leads to sketchy visual design?

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So let’s see what worked

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Long funnels can work

Not-so-obvious design principle:

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• Nice visual design?

• Good copy writing?

• Interest in the results?

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How to convince client/boss to go with the

better design?

Common design challenge:

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User-testing

A/B testing

Collaborative design workshops

Design rationale + jargon-y terms to add credibility (banner-blindness)

Convince one member of client team -- have them work behind the scenes to persuade the other!

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User-testing

A/B testing

Collaborative design workshops

Design rationale + jargon-y terms to add credibility (banner-blindness)

Convince one member of client team -- have them work behind the scenes to persuade the other!

Design changes/decisions late in the process tend to be hurried, and have high risk of having

unintended risk to overall design

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• 11% clicked through to client’s brochureware

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• 11% clicked through to client’s brochureware

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• only 2% shared the site

• and very little usage of the Compare filters

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Making things successfully social is hard to do

• only 2% shared the site

• and very little usage of the Compare filters

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How can agencies move from

Ongoing challenge:

launch and leave it to

launch, test, learn improve, repeat

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Thanks!@brian_donohuewww.iqcontent.com

and thanks to for letting us do this case study

We’re recruiting!