Fossil Finances

Friendly finances and resources meant to aid the elderly and others in need in navigating the financial landscape.

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Inspiration

Learning about Swivel's challenge, we felt inspired to rethink the banking app with elderly users in mind. As people with elderly family members ourselves, we know how tedious modern UI/UX can be to navigate for older people. This situation is a direct result of the general neglect of guidelines and best practices to ensure UI/UX is accessible and easy-to-use to all.

What it does

Fossil Finances is a simple but practical banking app with design principles tailored toward elderly and disabled users (high contrast, large buttons, limited navigation, etc.). Once the user signs in and links their bank accounts, they are greeted with a simple webpage showcasing a list of their bank accounts and respective balances. Also included in our webpage is a tab detailing the user's transaction history. On this page, the user can have details of a selected transaction read out loud. Furthermore, users will be messaged through SMS when the transaction list updates. Lastly, the Knowledge Base tab provides tailored information and tips for elderly users and users of color to ensure financial stability.

How we built it

After hearing and learning about the challenge, we started to research and ideate strategies to provide our users the best possible user experience. From this research, we focused on three targets: vision accessibility, large screen targets, and simple navigation. With these targets in mind, we started work on developing our website. Our website's tech stack consists of a React and Tailwind Frontend, a Flask and Firebase backend, along with various packages to make our development more efficient. With this, we were able to create a cohesive full-stack web-app meeting our original targets.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout the development process for our website, there were a few challenges and slow-downs we encountered. One of the prominent setbacks we ran into was the ability to send POST requests via our Flask backend to our Firebase database. Because of these issues, we ended up using GET requests instead. Another challenge our team faced was our inexperience with Firebase. We dedicated much time to learning and researching how Firebase works. Thankfully, we now have a greater understanding of how Firebase works for future projects.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our group is incredibly proud that we developed a fully functional web app with most of the planned features implemented. Each of us worked diligently and played a fundamental part in creating our web app.

What we learned

We learned much about programming, accessibility, and banking this past 24 hours. As for programming, our group learned a lot about programming in new environments. Whether it was React, Firebase, or Flask, each of us became more familiar with our respective languages. We also learned a lot about accessible web page design. Sources such as the Web Accessibility Initiative were invaluable in our development process. Lastly, we found it intriguing to learn about financial statistics for those over 65. While researching for our Knowledge Base, we read many articles and studies that observed the disparities and inequities in retirees.

What's next for Fossil Finances

Fossil Finances is a step in the right direction toward a more accessible and equitable web. We will continue to work on Fossil Finances to improve, refine, and implement features we didn't have time to implement.

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