Redesign That: Online Personal Finance (Part 6)
By guest authors Charles W. Bush and Kathy Hwang of 3Strand Innovation, a brand, design and business consultancy.
3Strand’s Concept Features for Wesabe:
Support Groups and Scorecard
Trying to get your finances under control can be an extremely stressful and overwhelming process. Throw in the worst economic downturn Generation Y has ever faced, and you’ve got a whole generation crying out for something to offer them a sense of control and stability.
Wesabe has a key opportunity to support these needs while emphasizing their core strength at integrating community into the money management process. In our redesign of their website service, we introduce the concept of Budget Buddies, friends in the Wesabe community who loosely act as your financial support group. With a daily feed of updates, you can see new goals, tips and requests posted by your more intimate community.
3Strand Concept Design - Budget Buddies
3Strand Concept Design - My Challenges
My Challenges is a feature that brings some friendly competition onto this social networking scene. Challenge a group of your friends to each “give up your Starbucks latte three days a week until April.” As Wesabe tracks your daily transactions, you can see who’s closest to keeping to their goals and winning the challenge. Make the hurdle of “saving money” less about strict abstinence and more about trash-talking with friends, with built-in community accountability. At the end of the challenge, you can see that you’ve already saved $50, and if you choose to continue with this habit, you could save an extra $500 by the end of the year.
Or maybe you’ve been eyeing the new BlackBerry Storm, but it’s not within your budget. Add it as a wish list item, and your account will automatically put any extra budget money towards this future purchase. Being able to track these challenges and goals gives you an easy and stress-free way to have control over your money.
The comparative Scorecard aspect of money management also brings up typical questions like:
What are people like me spending?
Am I paying too much for rent for my area?
How are others like me saving?
A critical part of these questions is the comparison to others of a similar age, location, or profession, who tend to have similar living styles and preferences. The Savings Board feature allows you to see how others like you are spending or saving, based on your own personalized search filters. So if you are in your 20s and very socially active, you get saving ideas for how to save money while staying social, such as “cook meals with friends during the week.” You can also compare your monthly spending habits to those of others like you, to see how you measure up to your peers.
3Strand Concept Design - Savings Board
Part 7 →
This segment is part 6 in a 7 part series
Jump to part: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Very nice. I like the specifics in this set of recommendations.
Here are some suggestions:
You have the consumer point of view in this analysis.
What about the publisher point of view? How does the publisher make money? What are the business objectives of the publisher? How do your design recommendations help in meeting those objectives?
And also, in that troika, you have to keep in mind the advertiser point of view.
Remember, you are dealing with media. Media businesses have 3 constituencies: consumer, publisher, and advertiser.
Your design needs to address the needs of all three.
there are some interesting ideas here, and what you’re proposing is pretty radical in the sense that social networking (e.g., FB, twitter, etc) as it is currently allows people to “show” what they want (e.g., photos of themselves they like, links to personal interests/causes, etc), but not necessarily what they don’t want to share.
admission to issues of debt and financial need is teaching people what it means to be vulnerable about what they don’t want/like to talk about — discipline, living within one’s means, prudence — and what’s interesting about your idea is that you’re saying that people need community with their financial challenges. just as weight loss goals via online forums, graphs, etc. are being shared with others with similar goals, this idea is approaching finances in a similar vein.
yep, i’m commenting from a consumer’s perspective, and though the site idea would definitely be targeted at a specific group (i.e., people self-selecting to share their financial needs/goals), i think it could serve a lot of people who are looking for that sort of community, even if only online.
p.s. if this takes off, it would be interesting to study the efficacy of a financial accountability site compared to a weight-loss accountability site. which is more effective in helping people their goals?
Hi All,
Check out http://www.perfios.com
For past few months I have been trying out a new product from a Bangalore based company called Perfios (Personal finance One Stop). It is an innovative software application to manage personal finance in a Safe and Trusted environment and help users analyze and understand their finance in a simple, easy and secure way.I am pretty thrilled with what it currently delivers and what is on the anvil for future. Hence I thought you may be interested in trying this out. Please visit http://www.perfios.com/tour.html and take a call.
~Prasad