Our Agile Experiment

Our goal was to create an app to help parents educate their children and establish financial education at a young age. The target market were millennial parents with children from ages 5 to 13; with 40 interns and 10 weeks, we were able to create a concept and build a working prototype. We involved the interns heavily in the process: weekly iterative ideation, sprint planning, and self-tasking. They were able to gain experience in mobile development, building services, and designing digital assets and wireframes in an agile environment. The outcome was a successful class of interns who felt invested in the ownership of their work, and were able to gain real industry experience in the tools and methods of product development.

As the design lead, I helped synthesize the initial vision of the look and feel, brand strategy, and product's direction. With a group of 3 design interns, I was able to help them to learn how to collaborate as a team, explore industry tools, and focus on delivering work as part of a larger scrum team.

Groundwork

For the preliminary work that led up to the interns' first day, I collaborated with the other developer coaches to run competitive research, identify key features and determine our end goals for an MVP.

Based on our initial findings, we concluded that the core features would be a combination of Task Management, Reward Administration/Acquisition, and Goal Planning. Our architecture had to reflect familiar actions, while also providing intuitive education for parents and children.

I created the app's information architecture to provide a basis and guide for the future sprints.

The first task was to develop a sign-up flow that would help introduce the intent of the app to the user, while seamlessly connecting their original accounts into the new app.

We could not narrow down on the look and feel, but continued to develop the basic features to establish the needed systems architecture and mobile UI that the developers needed to create.

As the interns got more involved in the design work, we went to task to create the kids' side of the app. We started to imagine and design the main screens and avatar picker flow.

Final Screens

After 10 weeks and many iterations to the look and feel, we were able to develop a working app. I identified design gaps and future changes in my project readout, and an outline of implementation for the app if it had gone into full production within the USAA ecosystem.

Parents View

Kids View