A tree of saving
Homepage

Introduction

Grow is a mobile application to help young people get interested in saving money. Grow was created with the guidelines; simple, user friendly, informative and fun! We want young people to feel encouraged to start saving early, and we believe that a sort of gamification is the way to go.

CaSoMa Consists of:

Carina Jansson ICT Student at Umeå University Sofia Höglund IT consultant, web and 3D developer (Sweco) Marie Höglund IT Consultant, R&D (HiQ)

Functionality

The idea for the application is to get young people to start saving. This leads to three main ways of saving money: Savings in an account, Funds or Shares. We chose to focus on Savings in an account, but we imagine them all working in a similar way. After creating an account and connecting it to your bank you come to a page consisting of three seeds. Each seed represent a different way of saving. If you choose account saving you will plant your lemon seed and start growing a lemon tree filled with goals! You can have up to five different savings, and each goal will be represented by a growing lemon. When making a goal for a saving you can decide if you want to save for a certain goal with a timestamp in which case the application will tell you how much you will have to save each month. Alternatively you can choose how much you want to save each month, and if you want to save until you have a certain amount. In that case the application will tell you when you’re going to reach your goal. As long as you keep transferring the correct amount each month the lemon will grow and thrive, but if you miss a payment the lemon will start to rotten for every missed month. By transferring to your savings account the lemon will start to feel better, and the application will update your monthly plan. You will always be able to track all of your lemons and see how much you have left, how much you have saved so far and if your plan has changed depending if you have followed the plan or not. You will also be able to see all of your achieved goals.

Inspiration

Since we already knew we wanted to make young people interested in economic and saving we had our target group sorted for the application. After brainstorming some ideas and judging from what we came up with the target group was pretty much set. We wanted to build an application for people around 15-25 who does not yet know to much about saving and economy. We see our application as a sort of tamagotchi that will help your future and present economy. The reason that we chose a plant is because we see a trend among many younger people to grow your own plants and taking care of them. So why not making taking care of your economy as popular as taking care of a plant. We also really like the representation of a plant that grows when your economy grow. We also like the fruits representing saving goals so that when these fruits are ready to be harvested you can literally harvest the fruit of your labour. Why wait for life to give you lemons when you can save them yourself, and make some sweet lemonade.

Creation of GROW

After coming up with an awesome idea we started to write down what we wanted the website to contain. After that we made a flowchart to get a better picture of what needed to be done. We did some quick lo-fi sketches, we sat up a graphic profile and after some research we started to build. Then followed a lot more googleing. We wanted to go all the way and made all of the illustrations ourselves.

Technology behind the project

The app is now running as a simple web page only made to be screened on phones. It's created by html, css and javascript. In the future the idea is that this will be an application that can be connected to your banking application. The connection will be needed to make transactions and viewing of your savings fast and easy.

Problems and improvements

One of the bigger problems we’ve had, but what we also think is quite usual at events like this, is that you really have to limit your ideas. You have to simplify and then simplify some more.

The other problem was how we were going to show our idea. We chose to make it as a web page, although the main idea is that it's supposed to be an application that can be integrated with your bank. We thought that it would be easier to have it at as web pages as well for demonstration and shareability. The page is now on a github page. There is still more to improve of course. If we had more time we would have wanted to increase the interaction with the plant. We think this is important to make the tree feel more real, and give a better experience. There are still lots of more improvements and function that needs to be implemented to make this saving experience simply great. We think the concept and the idea is a great offer for today's youth in making saving more fun and interesting.

Next for this project would be to rebuild it as a cross platform application and implement integration with banking applications.

How to use the application

To view the application either open the link on your phone or open it on google chrome and resize the window. The application is not a finished product and only for demo use. Therefore all of the functions and ideas are not implemented, but please feel free to click around to get a feel for the application.