G-Junior — Google pay for kids!
Designing the G-pay experience for kids.
Overview
This case study touches upon how can we create a digital banking experience for children as young as 12 years old; allowing them to start digital banking on their own and educate them about finance.
This study takes into account the age range of the primary target users (children) with guided access from the secondary target users (parents) and the financial aspects of the demographic region.
Research
Building an experience around digital tech and money involving children is important and is our target user behaviour. For adults it's quite an easy task and nature to spend, send and shop online from day-to-day transactions but it's difficult for kids to path around money that involves technology and payments as they do not have bank accounts solely on their names.
User Behaviour-
1.Financial Education —
According to “Habit Formation and Learning in Young Children” by Dr David White-bread and the Dr Sue Bingham University of Cambridge.
Money habits are formed in children by the age of 7. A lot of children by cultural aspects get pocket money on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, which to some extent exposes them to the concept of spending and the value of money. The age bracket of the target user is starting from 12 years because kids tend to develop and achieve a logical approach to understanding the concept of cashless money transactions.
2.Tech Friendly —
Children are increasingly getting tech savvy, with 40 per cent using computers and mobiles, 74 per cent of them aspiring to own camera phones and 80 per cent describing education and information as “very important.” Over 50% of children aged 6–15 responded that they can use and know a lot about apps on smartphones or tablets.
According to “Tech-Savvy Toddlers: Why are Young Children So Good With Technology?”,
User Persona —
Ideation, Challenges & Assumptions
The biggest challenge I faced was that google pay is sincerely for adults who have their bank accounts, UPI, bank balance, designated phone numbers etc linked to their accounts and also are designed to learn and use tech in a way where they save and spend maturely. A lot of features existing on g-pay are not relevant for kids' use.
Hence, I’ll be taking an approach that would address a kid's need to start using the G-Junior app.
Ideation for the child as a user —
1. Transform it into a virtual wallet that parents can top up or connect with their UPI and set limits according to their convenient time on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
2. Child can use their sub-UPI created by parents to pay, send and receive money.
3. Child can independently set aside some funds from allowance into a piggy bank as savings.
4. Children can track how much they’ve saved in their piggy bank.
5. Children can set their short-term goals to buy things that they desire.
6. Children can have some degree of independence and control of their spending.
Assumptions for the child —
1. Children have their phones and sole mobile numbers.
2. They have a basic understanding of how does digital payment app works.
3. Children will use G-junior for their spending across available merchants, p2p and savings.
4. Children can only send and receive money to verified accounts.
Ideation for the parent as a user —
1. Parents will create accounts for children from their G-pay accounts.
2. Parents can keep track of their child’s spending and monitor their activities.
3. Parents will receive notifications whenever there is activity or transaction in-app.
4. Parents will be able to set scheduled reminders for allowance payout day.
5. Parents can limit spending by depositing only a certain amount.
6. Parents can enable or disable children's accounts from their app anytime.
G-Junior UX strategy —
As G-Junior is the extension of G-Pay platform services, we are trying to keep UX similar to G-pay, at the same time define the new themes relevant to the kids.
While researching and thinking more about the problem statement we listed down a few basic features, to begin with, the MVP design.
- P2P payment — Children can pay their friends and other people who accept the UPI payment.
- Merchant Payment — the child can pay to the school canteen, stationery shop, general store etc. (we can also geo-tag the merchant acceptance if the parent doesn’t want the child to make payment to the merchant outside of their school or neighbourhood area- can be implemented in next versions)
- Piggy Bank/Saving — The fundamental idea of the app is to provide financial education to the child where they can understand the value of money and learn. We can introduce the Piggy Bank/saving concept where the child can add their small goal and add funds to it from their pocket money (monthly/weekly). Piggy Bank can also provide them interest or a reward when they complete the goal it can be app-driven or parent-driven.
- Split Bills — The split bill is a very important feature as part of learning and money management. A child can split the bill among their friends and send the request to another Childs G-junior account (by contact or UPI ) to settle it.
Apart from all the features listed above and support them, we do need to create a few basic user-flows and connect them in-app for quick accessibility and learning
The child can
- Check their transaction history
- See verified merchants and trusted UPI ids
- Can use basic e-commerce services like mobile recharge
- Can create multiple saving goals and see progress on the app
- Can check their rewards and offers
- Can check their activities to track their spending (for ex; spending on Food, Transport, Stationery, E-commerce, etc.)
Account Creation — Typically account creation is done by users by downloading the app and providing the necessary information to create the account but G-junior is a finance app for kids who don’t have a bank account and they are dependent on their parents/guardians. with this use case, I came to the conclusion that to create a G-Junior account, we can take mainly two approaches.
1- Let the Kid create the account themselves and ask them to invite parents to add them as children in their G-pay app.
2- Parents can create a child account from their G-pay app and extend their UPI service (sub-UPI handle) for kids to monitor, maintain and enable UPI transactions directly from their bank.
Below is the user flow diagram explaining how it will logically work.
Wireframe for Parent G-Pay app — Kid’s account creation
-As soon as a parent opens up settings on their G-pay they see an introduction card about g-pay for kids.
-Account creation starts with splash screens for parents to trust and understand how the platform works. For the next steps, they can enter their kid's name, phone number, and age.
-Once done, parents can enter their UPI pin on their G-pay pin to verify their authority.
-For the next steps parents can set up a dashboard cum profile for their kids, where they can set up a monthly budget, notification data, enable, disable who kids can pay etc.
Child account creation wireframe — G-Junior App
Account creation starts with splash screens for children to understand how the platform works. For the next steps, they can enter their phone number and OTP.
- If this is a child whose account has already been created by their parents. they’ll be able to see the card with all the relevant information like their UPI id, name, number, and parent's name.
- If this is going to be a new user whose account is not set up by parents, they’ll get a link to share with parents to set up an account using their G-pay accounts.
- Selecting a card will take you to the OTP screen which is sent on your parent's phone number to verify and also to confirm that the child has started the onboarding, which then takes them to the home page.
- There will be multiple cases for Home Screen, empty state, disabled state, and active state.
Visuals: There is a complete revamp for gpay for kids vs of how g-pay looks for parents’ phones. Since this is for kids, the colour scheme needed to be fun and interactive.
Existing user: G-Junior starts with a Splash screen and will be followed by the home screen for the existing users.
Making Payment — UX for payment is similar to G-Pay where users can click on “Pay by QR” and it will open the QR scanner and put the amount and pin to complete the payment. Users can also click on view all and search for a contact to pay them.
Few considerations/assumptions which can make it kid friendly
- Children do know the payment flow on onboarding or from parental guidance
- Parents can allow/restrict if they want the child to allow only P2P or Merchant or both kinds of payment to be done
- The parent can monitor every payment transaction happening by their child’s app on their app.
- Merchant will have verified tick ✅ on their profile to build trust and authenticity
Piggy Bank/Saving — Piggy Bank/saving concept where the child can add their small goal and add funds to it from their pocket money (monthly/weekly). Piggy Bank can also provide them interest or a reward when they complete the goal it can be app-driven or parent-driven.
Children/users can discover this feature from the home screen first viewport and also there will be cards relevant to their ongoing saving funds running on the same real state if they have any.
Split Bill — Split Bill is the most effective use case after payment & Piggy Bank saving. Most often kids go to the canteen and eat together where one person pays the bill and everyone splits Later. this feature enables kids to make the split happen digitally, and also lets them remind and keep track of it.
Whenever a user pays any amount to a verified merchant the paid summary card will show a button whether they want to split the payment with others or not. Initially, I kept it only on the verified merchant window but over time it can be optimised it only for limited categories of merchants and place the split bill button under the card summary to avoid redundancy on each card.
To build trust in parents there are several considerations that we have taken.
Safe
Strict parental controls to give them peace of mind and complete visibility whilst still promoting the child’s independence with money.
Rewarding
Boost earnings through set saving goals with added interest.
Visual
Stunning dashboards that track earnings, spending, bill split and saving
to both parents and children.
Things I would have done differently —
There could have been more research about the financial world and knowledge about how kids access money and learn about finance. Keeping kids attentive toward one single goal/app is a challenging task. There could also be a lot of emotions and connections that could have been added to the children's emotional ability to take decisions.
There can be a rethink of the structure of the screen based on User Scenarios.
Thanks for reading and see you next time :)
