Research has shown that financial literacy, especially among America’s youth, is dangerously poor. To address this problem, we propose to explore and collaboratively design, with PNC, a new type of data-driven banking services for families — services where teens can learn and practice financial basics by playing with real money.
During our initial user research (view research report), we discovered there is a group of teens who are proactive at seeking and practicing financial knowledge and many have started their own business. We call them business-oriented teens.
Then the questions are: What makes a business-oriented teen? How can help them grow? Can we transform average teens into business-oriented teens?
We modeled stakeholders and grouped them by their roles with respect to teen entrepreneurs.
by modeling comprehensively, we elicited feedback about a specific set of interesting value flows related to how digital payments and social networks were reshaping how an entrepreneurial teen could start and grow a business or project idea.
As a group, we brainstormed about 30 concepts. After grouping the concepts, we identified 8 interests area: community creation, feedback/incentive, job search, mentorship/workshop, machine/bot, payment, fund/actionable, and business management.
We selected top 10 ideas and visualized them with storyboards.
While speed-dating with users, many people are scared by the word “entrepreneurship”:
“Of course I’d like to have my own business, but I would never actually start one because it requires too much commitment. Entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone.” But what if entrepreneurship is for everyone?
From both our initial interview and secondary research, most teens in the US are making money in some way: do part-time jobs, sell hand-made crafts, run a farmer's market stand… By expanding our target user to any teens who are interested in making money, we want to help more teens see themselves as entrepreneurs and develop the mindset for operating a business.