Money Tree

Inspiration and Mission

The lack of financial literacy among youth inspired us to create Money Tree, an app aiming to aid personal finance management, promote financial literacy, and raise awareness about the environment in the process. Money Tree is a fun, game-like, gardening-themed app meant to make personal finance management easier, more interesting, and enjoyable for ALL youth, no matter their background. Financial literacy is an important skill to have, and we aim to bridge this education gap.

What It Does

Money Tree has multiple features— a homepage where you can track your balance and savings goal, an ability to create a forest with each savings goal reached, a “tool shed” with personal finance tips & tricks, a page to promote sustainability initiatives users can get directly involved in, and a profile you can personalize. Our main feature is the Progress Tree, a tree that grows as your savings do, and motivates you to reach your savings goals. As you reach your goals and grow trees, you'll have the option to build a forest. The forest will have trees of different sizes and shapes depending on the goal, larger trees for more ambitious goals.

How We Built It

After brainstorming, we collaboratively wrote down ideas and potential features to add to a document. We discussed them and consulted each other. Then, we worked together on Figma to bring our ideas to life through design.

Challenges Faced

We faced a few challenges, such as struggling to form a team at the beginning, lacking some development skills to complete our ambitions, switching team members due to schedule changes, different timezones, busy schedules, pivoting from one project idea to the next, and having to learn new design skills to adapt to changes. The design iteration meant some designs were swapped from others which helped us learn to adapt.

What We Learned

Aside from the UI/UX design skills we strengthened, we also learned how to better organize projects, collaborate with team members, adapt to new conditions, and manage our time.

What’s Next

We hope to improve our features and add even more to achieve our vision for Money Tree by making it more inclusive, useful, fun, and help it reach its full potential. For example, the ability to unlock tools as our forest grows as well as premium features such as a monthly savings summary!

Built With

• canva
• figma