Jason DePerro - Zen Garden

Project

The Zen Garden is a new financial app that focuses on building financial literacy and wealth in tandem through healthy habit forming activities. Make financial education empowering with real bank accounts set up to empower a customers life goals.

Problem

There is a lack financial literacy in America and it is costing us dearly. The National Financial Education Council found that lack of financial literacy cost Americans an estimated total of $415 billion in 2020. This recent study is on trend for the work for the data analysis and customer interviews my team conducted in 2014.

Target Market

Through our customer research we saw that financial literacy issues existed across age from high school students to middle aged adults. To find clarity we focused on college aged and recently graduated students as they were setting up their careers with a mostly clean financial slate.

Solution

A key objective of the app was to make financial education fun and empowering! By immersing customers inside a narrative experience they were brought on a journey that progressively became more complex and challenging as they advanced through saving money, creating goals, meeting their financial goals, using credit wisely and finally investing for their future. The journey takes them on the full arc of creating financial freedom, no small task. To avoid overwhelming customers new to financial planning lightweight gamification was used through small missions that employ users to create tasks with their live money.

Outcome

Beta customers saw the value in paying their future selves, a huge mental shift when it comes to saving towards goals rather than over leveraging credit. Creating an emergency fund and saving for a personal goal like a vacation or new device were common goals customers sought. Achieving these small goals created a sense of financial achievement that highlighted a path to financial abundance. While this research and development project was not shipped for mass adoption the learnings and insights have lived on into other Capital One products.

The initial concept rendering of the app with its companion card.

This video shows how funding a goal worked in the app. This clip highlights how we resolved to create—a fun, intuitive action while also making sure to showcase crucial financial information. The flow features clear 'Accept' and 'Cancel' buttons to reduce potential funding mistakes.

Early in the process, the customer feedback we gathered was that they would not visit their bank's website because it was full of bad news. Low balances, debt, and fees are just some of the bad news customers expected to be greeted with upon login. We envision something different—a fresh new look for a bank account, based on a calm, zen garden. A key hallmark is no balances are shown at entry; only the health of your accounts is depicted ambiently through the season, health, and size of the trees. Customers could find detailed financial info with one click.

A key to healthy finances is setting and reaching goals. In the Change Garden, I made this task fun through incentivizing positive behavior and giving users visual rewards for their efforts to pay their future selves. Saving can be made sexy, after all! These screens are initial prototypes.

The most critical first goal for a customer is to establish a rainy day fund. Through financial coach research, we learned that setting goals are essential to having a healthy financial lifestyle. The central theme of the app became completing missions around saving for the future. The team explored the best possible financial advice and began crafting missions to help customers build their financial health.

At this stage of development, we found the 3D garden visually distracting. The team underwent solving the challenge of providing a focus for the user's attention in 3D space. We created a blur that was added to the next prototype. You can see this in action in the demo video. This effect the team created, resulted in a more successful experience.

The team created a pace of crafting new builds regularly and testing them with friends, family, colleagues, and Capital One Customers. The 3D design was challenging to craft as it required a diverse set of tools and skills among the team. Once we established our design and development, pipeline began humming along as we iterated rapidly. As far as I know, this was the first and only 3D application to have real money movement.

The full Change Garden App demo video shows the first-time user experience highlighting the missions with the user's call-to-action to create financial goals. This piece represents the final app that we used for testing.

Pool Operating System