Clamify
"Clamifying" the way we learn about healthy spending and financing through an iOS design
Project Overview
“Clamify” was the last group project of Ohio State’s UX design bootcamp. The goal of this project’s scope was to focus on a real-world issue and solve the user’s challenges by creating an efficient app.
Problem
Younger audiences are having trouble navigating through today’s budgeting app landscape. Whether it be overwhelming financial jargon, bland user experiences, or login incentives. Users are finding it difficult to stay motivated when it comes to saving money and balancing their funds.
Solution
The development of our gamified budgeting app, Clamify, bridges the gap between fun and education. It is designed to not only teach users healthier spending habits but also make the learning process engaging and enjoyable, ensuring that users stay motivated while improving their financial skills.
“Today, only about one-third of Americans have a working understanding of interest rates, mortgage rates and financial risk, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. And this measure of financial literacy has fallen 19 percent over the past decade.”
- Time Magazine
Competitive Analysis
Since the main focus was solving the issue towards financial literacy and building a budgeting app, we started conducting competitive research to understand the features other apps had and their disadvantages. We knew we wanted to stand out from the crowd and incorporate gamification, so we had to study the financial industry as well as gamification apps that have gamified education elements.
User Interviews
After narrowing down our competitors, I wanted to understand users' struggles with finances and how comfortable they felt managing the money they earned. I prepared 20 open-ended questions focused on financial challenges and users’ learning styles. In three days, we recruited and interviewed 10 users remotely, ranging in age from 20 to 65.
​
What was interesting about interviewing such a wide age range was that the older the user, the more comfortable they were with keeping track of their finances, while Gen Z, for example, felt overwhelmed and unsure of healthy spending habits. It seemed that the users we interviewed felt they were never taught healthy spending habits in school, let alone in their households, which contributed to poor financial organization.
Key Findings:
​
-
100% of gen z interviewed said they relied on their “mind” to keep track of expenses
-
Majority of gen z users felt overwhelmed with how expensive their expenses were
-
Users above the age of 50 felt more confident in their financial tracking and would only download a budgeting app if it was easy to use
-
100% of gen z users learning style was visual learning, craving instant gratification when completing tasks
Defining the User
After conducting thorough research,I understood our target user is within gen z needing an entertaining way of learning healthier financial habits while also being able to input spending to track expenses.
Problem Statement
Younger audiences are having trouble navigating through today’s budgeting app landscape. Whether it be overwhelming financial jargon, bland user experiences, or login incentives. Users are finding it difficult to stay motivated when it comes to saving money and balancing their funds.
User Journey
Once the problem was identified, we narrowed down the specific features needed in our budgeting education app idea. The features include:
-
Visual learning in a gamified way, keeping learning easy to understand and tailored to the users specific spending habits
-
A playful theme to grasp gen z users attention while also programming “instant gratification” when a lesson is completed
-
A free app that allows users to manually enter in their expenses to help them keep track of their spending
User Flow
​This was the most difficult step: linking the educational portion of the app to the financial tracking feature seamlessly. We wanted to ensure that the user understood the main goal of the app was to educate and enhance financial literacy, specifically tailored to the user’s inputted expense information.​
Wireframes
After creating the user flow and finalizing the navigation, I implemented our UI style guide to ensure consistency and alignment with the app's visual identity. I then wireframed the prototypes, starting with low-fidelity versions to map out the basic layout and interactions.
These wireframes were gradually refined into high-fidelity prototypes, incorporating the final UI elements, colors, and typography, providing a closer representation of the app's look and feel for testing and feedback.
Final Product
.png)
Next Steps
Due to the three-week time frame of this project, our group decided to focus more on the design process rather than coding.
​
Since we only had time to focus on one feature—the learning portion of the app—we would also like to add a feature that allows users to link their credit/debit card information, eliminating the need to manually input their expense amounts.