Re:ceipt

Inspiration

This project was inspired by the financial and sustainability challenges faced by young adults, particularly students and recent graduates. As college students ourselves, both working co-ops, we are intimately familiar with the responsibility of financial management, and the social expectations to spend money. Furthermore, as active members of our communities (Code4Community, Former Girl Scouts of America and Key Club Member), we have a conscious preference for sustainable choices but are held back by financial limitations and a lack of transparency into how our consumption affects the environment. This sparked the idea for Re:ceipt—a platform that offers financial guidance, social incentives, and environmentally conscious suggestions all in one place. By helping young adults make mindful decisions about their spending, we can foster habits that benefit both personal finances and the planet.

What We Learned

Through this project, we learned how important it is to understand the deeper motivations behind spending behaviors. Our research revealed that financial and social factors heavily influence consumption choices, and simply offering eco-friendly alternatives isn’t enough. We need to align sustainability with both intrinsic and extrinsic motivating factors (i.e Our Community Challenges Feature) to make it feel accessible and rewarding.

We also learned the importance of academic research in shaping a design model. By consulting behavioral economics and sustainability frameworks, we could ground our approach in existing knowledge. Insights like the Friedkin-Johnsen model on social influence and the role of financial literacy in sustainable behaviors helped us tailor the project to address the root causes of unsustainable consumption.

How We Built the Project

We started by ideating through potential solutions to the designathon prompt, before settling on Re:ceipt as our product. The two of us spent all of Friday conducting user research, by sending out a survey to gather data on student and young adult spending behaviors, which helped identify key challenges and motivations in spending sustainably. Using this first round of insight, we looked into academic papers that related the psychology of spending to the development of sustainable habits later in life, as well as the influence of social rapport on sustainability. From there, we created user personas, user stories, and ran some market analysis of Banking Application Tools (Bank of America, Discover, Capital One) to identify key UI components and distinctive pain-points. We integrated these second-round insights into a low-fidelity prototype, before iterating into the high-fidelity prototype linked below.

Challenges Faced

One of the major challenges we faced was working on a team asynchronously. The two of us were working together for hours on end while being 300 miles away, which required a high-level of communication and trust in one another as designers. Besides the logistically difficulties, another major challenge was balancing two approaches to sustainability within a single project, Economic Sustainability and Environmental Sustainability. Early on, we agreed that we would need a very focused approach to user research, to ensure that the scope of our project didn't get too large, and we were able to keep our users at the forefront of the design project. Ultimately, building a platform that balances financial advice with emotional and social well-being required a lot of iterations to get the tone and features right, but the depth in our user research certainly helped.

Built With

• figma