ProdCon 2021
ProdCon is a 1-day hackathon held by the UW Project Management Club where teams focus on presenting a product pitch to the sponsoring company: Wealthsimple an upcoming digital financial service.
We put together a group of designers to challenge ourselves with tackling a primarily PM-based challenge and ended up winning 1st place! 🏆
The Problem Space
Wealthsimple is a Canadian online investment management service that launched several applications for financial management, including Wealthsimple Cash in 2020 which allows users to digitally send and receive money. To gain exposure, they launched several promotions, such as food discounts, with local businesses on Canadian University campuses.
After interviewing students, we discovered that while Wealthsimple's current promotion efforts were effective in getting their name known and their app downloaded, after accessing promotions users would cease to use Wealthsimple Cash and continue to use e-transfer, not even aware of the main functions of Wealthsimple's app.
Therefore the initial problem we sought to solve was:
How do we engage users after current local business promos?
Research & Brainstorming
We started with researching Wealthsimple's main competitors. We found that while Wealthsimple was not lacking in features compared to its main competitor Interac E-Transfer it did not have any new features to convince users to switch away from the bank apps they were comfortable using. We saw that there were opportunities to incorporate new, innovative features in Wealthsimple Cash to make them stand out amongst competitors and began brainstorming ideas.
Our main goal became: How do we encourage users to switch to Wealthsimple for cash transfers and transactions over other methods?
During our brainstorming, we noticed that Wealthsimple Cash lacked a bill-splitting feature for groups. From our experience as students, being able to seamlessly split a bill amongst friends after sharing a meal or a night out would be a beneficial service.
Starting to Plan
Primary Goal: Prompt users to use WealthSimple Cash at moments when they usually go for traditional payment methods by leveraging push notifications.
Our primary goal was to promote using Cash at moments when users would usually go for traditional payment methods. The goal is to ingrain Cash into the user's current routine and familiarize users with the payment flow.
Secondary Goal: Promote quick splitting bills, paying bills features at stores, and form user habits.
Our second goal was to make Wealthsimple Cash stand out amongst other transfer apps by creating and promoting unique features that traditional bank apps don't provide. Our idea for a new feature was "airdropping" money for quick bill splitting.
Our Proposed Additions
📍 Provide location-based discount push notifications - e.g. try to identify when users enter a food plaza and prompt specific discount notifications.
👥 Prompt bill-splitting feature when a group of friends is nearby - if the location service recognizes users are visiting a store/restaurant with a group of friends, prompt users with a group discount or promote instantaneous bill-splitting.
🚦Opportunity: Avoid-the-wait payment - for future implementation we would consider partnering with establishments to enable avoid-the-wait payments which allows users to immediately send payments through the Cash app without having to wait for busy employees to bring the payment machine.
Mockup Time!
Our solution starts with using location services to time the perfect push notifications while you are out with friends. In our design, the app would recognize that multiple users with mutual contacts are together and send a coupon to encourage the group to grab dinner at the nearby restaurant at a discounted price by using the Wealthsimple Cash app to pay.
This will incentivize them to try out the app by offering a small promotion. From our research, we can see that from the current food deals promoted by Wealthsimple in University towns, students and young professionals love getting a good deal. We can leverage the successful results of Wealthsimple's current promotions and apply the same technique here.
We also decided to design a UI for a new feature we called "Wealthdrop" which is inspired by airdrop where you can see the nearby contacts around you and send media such as photos. There are different profiles floating around that represent your different nearby friends. This design adds a fun and interactive experience that is easy to use and intuitive.
In the flow for using Wealthdrop, there are 2 different scenarios we considered:
1. When sending to 1 contact nearby - simply select the bubble of the person you want to transfer to that pops up on the screen, if you have previous transfer history it will show, type in the amount you want to transfer and send!
2. When splitting with multiple contacts nearby - the process is almost the same but begin with long-holding the first bubble to select multiple and click "split the bill"! Cash will automatically calculate the split based on the number of people and the typed amount and transfer from each account!
Both have similar user flows so users are familiar with the process and adding many members to one group does not complicate the process.
Future Opportunities
Due to the time restraints of a 1-day hackathon, we were only able to build our initial pitch, however, if we had more time this is how we would work to improve our idea!
1. Continue to conduct user research and tests to improve future iterations and accommodate edge cases
2. Explore different UI designs
3. Research into privacy concerns and Bluetooth usage