Following a six-week project with Moneythink addressing financial literacy in youth, the IDEO.org team is excited to announce the launch of the Moneythink app - a social platform to encourage youth to engage in challenges about their financial decision-making.

Just a few months after the start of our project, our designs are already being put to use! Our IDEO.org team collaborated with Moneythink, a Chicago-based organization bringing financial literacy to youth, on a six-week project in order to design a mobile app in support of their curriculum. Through just one week on the ground during our research phase and another week for rapid prototyping, we sprinted to design a platform that leverages Moneythink's existing curriculum and mentorship experience to provide a savings roadmap to students, while expanding the curriculum's impact by facilitating engagement outside of the classroom.

Working closely with Moneythink staff, participating students, and the program's mentors in urban high schools of Chicago, our final app design was deeply rooted in the financial behaviors characteristic of teens. Our team identified five core insights about the youth experience of financial decision-making that provided us with direction. 

1. Sporadic Income: Income flow is based on sporadic events like birthdays, holidays, or occasional gigs such as babysitting. 

2. Financial Dependency: Students have varying degrees of dependency on parents or guardians for support. Even those with their own bank account are often not in control of their own finances.  

3. Creative Tradeoffs: Youth demonstrate remarkable creativity and scrappiness in their financial choices and tradeoffs when it comes to stretching a dollar. 

4. Money is Social: At this age, money is both received by other people and spent with other people. Teens are extremely social about their finances.

5. Mobile, Mobile, Mobile: Mobile is the most relevant way to reach low-income youth. 

Additional insights arose by understanding these financial behaviors in the context of the curriculum, which relies heavily on the student-mentor relationship and the adaptability of mentors on a student-to-student basis. And while these relationships are key and need to be supported through new tools, mentors still need a certain level of flexibility to meet the needs of their mentorees. 

We quickly realized that any new mobile tools would need to not only provide non-traditional savings and budgeting capabilities to support the curriculum, but also leave room for creative flexibility, on both the part of the student and the mentor. Equally as important, anything created to aid the student has to first and foremost support the student-mentor relationship. 

The final Moneythink app created by our team is an interactive social platform where youth can engage in challenges that build financial awareness, skills, and habits for saving. Though these challenges are facilitated by the mentors each week as part of the curriculum, the platform is primarily driven by ongoing peer and mentor activity. Students are incentivized to participate on the app through a points system, which rewards them for completing challenges and, in turn, creates competition for recognition. The platform provides value to mentors by allowing them to keep track of students' performance and provide immediate support and encouragement, while at the same time gaining a better overall understanding of their students' progress.

With the amazing development support of CauseLabs, Moneythink has just launched the pilot app this month on Android with a total of nine challenges. Among others, these pilot challenges include, SnapTrack, where students snap photos to track their weekly #spending and #saving behaviors, The ‘In’ Crowd, where users make connections on LinkedIn to show off their skills, and Savvy Selfie, a tool to add a professional twist to personal style and adapt an appropriate look for the working world.

We look forward to seeing the mobile app in action and its impact as part of the Moneythink curriculum!