Kids' Financial Literacy Mobile App Concept

I created a mobile app concept to answer the challenge of reimagining banking for children. The project was aimed at bringing children in Malaysia on board with healthy financial habits early so that they may bring these healthy habits with them into adulthood. I spent two days working on this project.

Research

I was given two days to complete the challenge. It was difficult to secure five children from Malaysia to interview on such short notice so I opted instead to interview five adults, of which three are Malaysians and two are Singaporeans with roots in Malaysia; all five interviewees regularly visit their kampung (Malay word for “village”) in Malaysia.

My questions were focused towards the life of children in kampungs as I wanted my solution to be as accessible as possible and I needed to better understand if mobile phone access was common for children not just in the city, but in the rural kampung as well.

Through my interviews, I learned that most children in kampungs do have mobile phones though these are hand-me-downs (this is supported by four out of five interviewees). An interesting insight learned was that Wi-Fi is not at all common in a kampung (only one interviewee shared that Wi-Fi is easily available in his kampung).

Another interesting insight gathered was that most children living in a kampung only spoke Malay or Mandarin. I made sure to include a language option into the app; particularly in the account creation screen.

Proposed Concept

The hypothetical solution takes the form of a mobile app that requires no internet connectivity (apart from the initial download of the app). I decided to narrow down my scope to the account creation as well as the onboarding flows to allow myself to focus more on the key aspects of my solution.

The app is a gamified education app aimed at using in-app collectible rewards to incentivise the user to learn more about financial literacy through the app.

Users can deposit virtual currency earned from completing a series of mini-games into a wishing well. Depositing enough virtual currency will let users free wishing stars trapped in the well. Additionally, each wishing star is part of a constellation; freeing all stars belonging to a constellation will unlock a constellation that when tapped will present the user with some financial information.

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