Provision: Generosity Engine

How can you simultaneously maximize your finances and your generosity towards others? Designing a different type of fintech app with Provision and the Generosity Engine.

Format: Web App

Research: Competitive Analysis, User Surveys, Cognitive Walkthrough, Usability Tests, Accessibility Audit, SME Interviews

Tools: Figma, Excel, Zoom, Google Slides

Group or Solo Project: Group

Executive Summary

Problem-Space

Innuevation CEO Adam Arends is designing a personal finance web application called Provision, which aims to blend financial education and budgeting with a strong focus on generosity, which he calls the Generosity Engine. Mr. Arends knows finance like the back of his hand, but has been struggling to visualize how the Generosity Engine will work, so he came to us for help.

Our Approach

We utilized a wealth of research methodologies to hone in on what is important to users when considering generosity: a personalized dashboard, a focus on the impacts of giving, and most importantly, the ability to donate time in the same way as donating money. This became the focus of the product we designed and delivered to Mr. Arends.

Initial Research

To be able to thoughtfully design the Generosity Engine, we needed to learn a lot about both the fintech landscape and the generous giving landscape. First, we conducted a competitive analysis, examining financial products as well as generous giving products. We found that while there is a lot to choose from, the market is fairly segregated and there is nothing offering quite what Provision is aiming for.

A sample from the competitive analysis of banking and generosity apps


We then conducted a user survey, wherein we learned about people’s personal finance habits as well as their generous giving habits, and what is important to them when considering how to donate time or money. We found that being able to support a cause they believe in is of paramount importance, as well as the ability to see how their time or money made a difference.


From these survey results we were able to craft proto-personas that reflected the various financial states and generous giving habits of our respondents.


Using that research, we brainstormed a number of features and used them to conduct a Kano Analysis, which aims to determine what features a user expects or would be delighted by in a product. We found that a personalized dashboard, clear data visualizations and the ability to log donations of time and money were the most important features to our potential users.

Onboarding

Part of the Generosity Engine’s capabilities include being able to learn a user’s habits and cater its recommendations appropriately. To help facilitate this, we decided a guided onboarding was necessary. This process would introduce the user to Provision and the Generosity Engine, then ask the new user to take a short quiz to learn more about their generous giving habits. I took principal ownership of this process, and used the user survey as a guide for crafting questions, then designed a set of causes the user could choose from to craft their generosity experience.

Dashboard

Creating an attractive, easy-to-understand and customizable dashboard presented a challenge. Originally, Provision was going to feature a home page and themed sections, such as budgeting, learning, and generosity, and most content would be found in those sections. However, we felt that this made Provision unwieldy and overly-complex. We chose to distill the experience into a single dashboard with customizable widgets that could be found and easily added via a drop-down menu. Widgets would take up ⅙ of the screen in their default state but could be expanded into larger sizes on the dashboard. Finally, some experiences, like the learning center and the donation flow, would expand into full-screen experiences so the user could give them their undivided attention.

Widgets

I was primarily responsible for designing how the widgets would look, their shape and size, and how the user would add, edit, expand and delete them. I enabled users to have multiple points of access for those options, including by clicking on unused space on the dashboard, clicking the dropdown menu on a widget, or clicking the main menu button on the dashboard. This ensures that users won’t have to “hunt down” the correct menu to customize the dashboard how they want.


We designed thirteen widgets for Provision under four categories: My Finances, My Generosity, Learning, and My Time. These widgets give the user the power to manage their finances, learn how to grow their wealth, and give back to the community. I designed the majority of the finance widgets and provided data visualizations for some of the generosity and time features. 

Donating Time & Money

So far we’ve established that the Generosity Engine can learn about a user’s habits and present donating and volunteer opportunities to them via customizable widgets. But how do you give the user context for their actions, and get them to care about the tools they’ve been given? Initially, gamification in the form of points and levels was discussed, but they tested poorly among potential users. We struggled with these questions until we came up with two “A-ha!” moments:

  • The users should be given the same tools to budget donating their time and money as they do for managing their finances

  • Instead of asking users to level themselves up for internet points, we show them how their generosity levels up the community around them


From these we crafted the two most critical components of the Generosity Engine:  the Generosity and Time Budgets, and the Your Impact and Community Impact widgets.


Generosity and Time Budgets

The Generosity Budget is a slice taken of the user’s monthly budget to be used for charitable donations. The amount fluctuates based on the user’s financial forecast and can be adjusted if desired. When the user completes a donation, they can log it into their donation history. The Time Budget works in a very similar way. The user establishes a monthly time budget (work, food, errands, leisure, etc) and a slice is taken for donating time in the form of volunteering or Random Acts of Kindness. The user can log their time into their volunteer history the same way they would log their donations. This method gives the user attainable goals for each month and lets them track their progress on their own terms.


Community and Individual Impact

The Community Impact widget shows the user what impact organizations and other Provision users are having in the community. Clicking on the icons gives the user more information about each act of generosity and, if applicable, the option to contribute.


Finally, the Your Impact widget gives real-time updates to the impact the user is having on the community based on their acts of generosity. For example, if the user donated to an animal rescue, they may be told what the shelter was able to do with that money. This widget can also suggest similar causes for the user to support.


These components give users the ability to track their generosity and strategically improve their community, and are truly the beating heart of the Generosity Engine.

From this map, a basic flow of our plan was crafted, also using Invision. We envisioned the engagement points to lead users to a landing page on the NBH website, allowing users to take a Rule-25 assessment. At this point, a mobile app could be downloaded, which will give users resources and keep them engaged until the referral for treatment comes in, at which point the app would be used in conjunction with their inpatient and outpatient treatment. Let’s look at this flow in greater detail.

Deliverables

Our work was presented to Mr. Arends and the local community on June 15, 2021 and was an overwhelming success. From that point, we began crafting our handoff package of deliverables, which consisted of the following:

  • Synthesized Research Findings

  • Presentation Deck and Recording

  • Fully-Interactive Prototype (made in Figma)

  • SVG files of all assets

  • Style Guide

  • Annotated WIreframes


I was principally responsible for delivering the style guide and interactive prototype. For the style guide, I wanted to ensure Mr. Arends not only had access to the basic necessities, such as color and text styles, buttons, links, etc, but also the ability to quickly craft more widget mockups, donation cards, and learning center cards. So, I created masters of every widget and card size and shape, using variants to make it easy to quickly swap out colors, sizes, and elements.


For the Interactive Prototype, I made sure that every important flow was represented, including the adding and customization of widgets, data visualization of budgeting features, accessing the learning center and reading a blog post, donating monetarily, logging a volunteer event, and seeing the community and individual impact.


The handoff packet was delivered to Mr. Arends on June 17, 2021. He was overjoyed with the work we had done and is currently working with his team of developers to bring Provision and the Generosity Engine to life.

 Next Steps

Though we have completed our work, we had gained some further insights during our research that we felt could be valuable for Mr. Arends for the future. Nearly 70% of our respondents did the majority of their personal finance management on their mobile devices. We strongly believe that Provision will need to be able to make the leap into the mobile landscape in the future for it to have the strongest impact. We made this recommendation to Mr. Arends during the handoff and he agreed that determining mobile feasibility was high on his priority list moving forward.