WhyBuy

Inspiration

With concerningly decreasing attention spans in the younger generations, people become increasingly prone to impulse purchases and harmful financial decisions. One-click checkouts, endless advertising, and saved payment methods have done nothing but add fuel to the fire. We wanted to create solution to this worsening by problem by developing an extension for google chrome that not only blocks purchases, but actively encourages critical thinking and analysis before spending. Inspired by debates and a court setting, we created WhyBuy, a product that literally puts every purchase you make on trial before money leaves your wallet.

What it does

WhyBuy is a Chrome browser extension that intercepts purchases done online right before the checkout, transforming your screen into an interactive courtroom experience. When a user attempts to buy a product, the item is placed "on trial," and the user becomes its defense attorney, while an AI-powered prosecutor argues against the purchase. It poses key facts such as its necessity, value, long-term utility, alternatives, and potential buyers remorse. A structured debate commences afterwards, allowing both sides to pose points and rebuttals. After 3-5 rounds of debate, a neutral, AI-powered judge delivers a verdict, as well as a confidence score and a brief explanation as to why. If the judging declares that the purchase is fine to go ahead with, you'll return to the checkout page you were once in. But, if the verdict declares the purchase as something you shouldn't go ahead with, then you will be locked out and unable to purchase that item for 24h hours, after that time period you may have a re-trial.

How we built it

AI "vibe coding" helped us quickly build our MVP; however, the system architecture and design choices made by our team solely. Our team designed the entire architecture of the system, its modular extension design, the AI debate flow logic, the state machine logic, the checkout detection pipeline, and the feature integration approach. As we did not ask the AI to "build the app for us," we gave it more of a junior developer role and divided the whole development process into manageable chunks, implementing the project step-by-step under guidance. All high-level design considerations, scalability considerations, and interaction flow logic design ideas came from us, our team.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was to find a good balance between entertainment and practicality. Our task was to create an entertaining and memorable environment for users but without irritating them and hindering the purchase process. It was quite difficult to develop AI systems which could provide meaningful debates but not give financial advice to users. For an AI to work well, it had to understand the context of the discussion and provide arguments, taking into account all issues raised. Another difficult point was to build a seamless user experience which could interrupt the process of making purchases.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our biggest source of pride is that we have turned what was once a problem for everyone into a fun interactive experience. Instead of simply developing another budgeting tool or tracker, WhyBuy offers a unique experience that provokes users to reconsider how they spend money. We're also proud to have developed a product that integrates machine learning, behavior psychology, and good old creative design. The court-room theme serves as the identity of the product and helps users become more aware of their financial choices. More importantly, we have developed something that can potentially save users' money without becoming boring.

What we learned

We came to learn during our project that user engagement is very critical in many cases as much as functionality is. Users tend to embrace applications which are entertaining and memorable than simply providing information. Secondly, we were able to design interactions with AI and discovered how significant structure is in developing debate, reasoning, and decision-making systems. Another thing we learned is how behavioral design may impact decisions made in good ways.

What's next for WhyBuy

Our vision is to evolve WhyBuy into a complete AI-powered purchasing advisor. Possible features include customized spending profiles, connections to budget apps, purchase history analysis, savings monitoring, and customized argumentation styles based on the shopping preferences of users. Features that we would like to develop are “Appeal the Verdict,” allowing users to have a debate with their friends regarding a certain purchase, as well as a feature that helps track purchases made over time and assesses whether or not the decision was right. In the end, we want WhyBuy to serve as the court of consumer choices, assisting people in making better decisions, avoiding impulsive behavior, and cultivating healthy money management skills.