Inspiration
Millennials are a growing consumer base that lacks necessary skills to reach a functional level of financial stability. We've made a personal, predictive budgeting app that helps educate users in the skills they need for financial success
What it does
We've made an app that helps people achieve financial strength buy solving for the basic need for education. Many of the budgeting applications already in the market act as a crutch: helping the user carry themselves along, more mobile than before, but still just as handicapped. SMARTY is designed to educate rather than just inform, training the user to build the financial strength they need.
Simply presenting the user with numbers, facts, or statistics does not teach the user strong financial skills, or how to save. SMARTY helps the user apply the information as though their life was an immediately applicable story problem. Iron Man has Jarvis, iOS has Siri, Amazon has Echo, etc. so why doesn't your bank have intelligent banking? SMARTY is designed to fill that gap, not just projecting finances, but predicting financial situations.
How we built it
We worked from the strong product design straight to production mockups, developing final presentation assets and a fully developed UI kit. We used Photoshop, Balsamiq, and Ionic.io for the prototyping and framework, and developed in/with HTML5, CSS3, javascript, and Cordova.
For continued growth, we compiled a loose set of design standards for future production, and have designed the application flow and code to be capable of growing into a market-ready application.
Challenges we ran into
We spent a great deal of time and effort in the ideation and product development stages in order to build an innovative solution. The market research, interviews, and strategizing lead to a better product, but gave us less time to build the final product.
The road to the hackathon was a wild ride: everything from emergency hospitalization for mystery causes to a simple lack of transportation to the location. Despite health crises and logistical issues, we executed extensive conceptual and production design; after interviews and research, we then built and skinned this intelligent budgeting, financial education and training app in a weekend.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Effective team synergy and professionalism despite adverse conditions, Creative and solution-centric ideation, Strong product design, Quick, but quality, production design assets, Resilient roles that survived through losing team members, and finishing!
What we learned
We learned a great deal about the financial industry from the perspective of the millennial, as well as the challenges that they face in finances. We learned how to match the needs of the industry with the needs of the individual.
What's next for SMARTY
Continued testing and improved device support, expanding to full AI support predictive and intelligent budgeting, Improved feature support, Social media integration, We hope to continue expanding on the application and developing out what could be an industry-leading capability.
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