GravyStack
An educational yet entertaining banking platform for kids and teens featuring an interactive world of financial missions and management.
Prototyping Samples
View select prototypes to understand how a user might engage with specific components throughout their experience with this project.
Alternatively, to further explore this project, view in Figma.
Project Overview
Deliverables: User personas, user flows, journey maps, sitemap, components, and full-site high-fidelity prototypes.
In a quickly growing market of educational financial platforms, GravyStack has its mission cut out—to appeal to kids and teens in a way other platforms cannot.
Instead of a parent/guardian trickle-down approach, GravyStack seeks to directly convince young learners so they are excited to engage with an educational platform instead of forced.
GravyStack looks to harness its unique interactive world of play, characters, and missions to garner the attention of younger generations.
Problems
The platform is currently beta testing and must retain interest despite limited accessibility to the product
Banking through gaming is a new concept that requires content-heavy user education
Overcoming user hesitancy to trust a startup company and beta platform with the responsibility of teaching crucial financial concepts to vulnerable and moldable minds
Design Goals
Appeal to younger target audiences without compromising credibility and expertise sought from parental audiences
Design a coherent and enticing website with minimal brand guidelines and product content while beta testing continues
Find a balance between digestibility and lengthy content required to introduce this new idea of gaming to bank
Visualizing a journey
A mobile beta product targeting two different audiences is grounds for a wide spectrum of personas and user expectations. However, the end goal to have kids and teens utilizing an educational banking platform remains the same regardless of initial user motivations. Approaching personas and user journeys with the end goal in mind was particularly important in carving out relevant experiences for GravyStack.
Personas and user journeys for this project are available upon request.
Lessons and Takeaways
Composing a design solution that balances fun and credibility was not as challenging as originally thought. The purest form of credibility comes from positive human experience and enjoyment or fun is a natural byproduct of a positive experience. Leaning into imagery, videos, and dialogues of real people engaging with the beta product naturally conveys the fun GravyStack offers in their platform.
Additionally, users are hesitant to trust any online service with their personal information in general. Being in beta, GravyStack is currently seeking phone numbers and emails in order to update interested users. However, more emphasis should have been put on upfront security measures to curb privacy concerns instead of relying on more hidden backend disclosures.