PIGGY
Spend together and get rewarded

Project focus:
research, design strategy, social payments, mobile app product design

Summer 2021 | SCAD MA Design Management Graduate Project
10-week project to define, develop and design a new social network

The design brief?

Create a new social network

OVERVIEW

For my graduate class at SCAD in design innovation development and marketing strategies, I worked with three other graduate students in taking an abstract design prompt from our professor Tom Hardy that catalyzed in conceiving, developing and designing a new social network. This process led us to develop a new social payments app that took the best of popular apps like CashApp and Venmo and evolved it into an app that took it another step further into group payment situations for trusted friends.

CHALLENGE

As 4 graduate design students who have never worked together, and collaborating within a totally remote environment in a pandemic, we had to get creative with how we self-organize and rapidly drum up our capabilities and processes to realize this project. In addition, this was completed while each one of us were juggling a mixture of full-time jobs, multiple classes, and navigating the pandemic.

APPROACH

Through our research, our key insight realizing that today’s popular payments apps like CashApp and Venmo were largely built for a 1:1 use-case where you had to search a username and pull the trigger to send a payment. But what if you were with a group of friends splitting a restaurant bill? Going on a vacation together? How would you make this easier so you didn’t have to go through so many clicks and processes to complete splitting expenses without all the “IOU” but “let’s share this” mentality.

Within trusted groups of close friends and family, we realize that most apps today generate an “I-owe-you” mentality, and we wanted to shift that to one where you focus less on the transactional, and more on the relationships and creating memories together.

Highlights

Project group

We each had focus areas in the project group, including:
Gordon Ching (brand + design strategy, product design, research)
Cassie Soumas (brand identity and design, creative direction, research)
Sydney Gayda (design strategy, content writing, research)
Huizhong Zhu (product design, research, project management)

10 weeks — total project scope and timeline

One of the most beautiful things about graduate school is that you have the luxury of a controlled process to demonstrate our craft across a specific timeline. In these ten weeks, we covered immense ground across the design spectrum to demonstrate our skills as designers and strategists.

Research Insights

Existing payment apps today are largely designed for 1:1 transactions. For group payments today, there is no easy way to share the transaction without having to manually transfer money to each individual every single time. We wanted to change this while also targeting the zeitgeist around promoting more open relationships with money between friends.

Design Execution

Group Payments

We reversed the logic of having to “transfer” people 1:1 for the first concept of our MVP — instead users are able to create groups where they can add their trusted friends that can access a shared digital wallet for depositing money and using it to pay for shared expenses between the group. The overarching premise was focused on incentivizing groups to set a shared budget and contribute to the fund as they saved up towards an upcoming trip or event (roadtrips? raves? vacations? you name it!).

Key features include: Apple Pay, QR Code, Transaction History, Deposits, Funding Progress, Multiple Cards, Wallets.

Deposits

A familiar deposit experience that users can add funds to the group card, including aspects of gamification to complete the set target of the pre-set budget. At a broader level, our goal was to experiment with how we can change the IOU culture into one of shared enjoyment.

Rewards

We want to bring back something nostalgic and familiar to the world of digital payments — stamp reward cards. From a user experience perspective, this concept promotes user loyalty to merchants, while helping users gain rewards for repeat visits, like a free boba tea.

Users are able to easily organize their reward cards and track their progress towards reward redemption. For merchants, we designed specific featured promotional capabilities to help them grab user attention and drive sales.

SUMMARY

Working on this concept furthered my interests in the world of consumer payments and thinking about how design and technology can promote new interactions with money and between our social relationships. By thinking around the consumer problems around money, payments, and access — it has opened new perspectives to me. When I connect the dots, I think about how apps like Robinhood and CashApp has changed the conversation of money for younger people and has made it more transparent, open, and honest.