tips. is a group project created for 2017 MLH Local Hack Day @ Temple University. It was my second Hackathon experience, and first time winning a challenge. Our challenge was posted by Vanguard -- create an application that makes young people start thinking about investing and savings.
The concept of "tips." is "tipping your future self". We designed it to be a web extension that allows the users to make a tip every time they make an online purchase. The users can customize the tip amount, and it will be collected into the user's savings account.
In this challenge -- helping young people to start thinking about investing and savings -- we think the biggest problem that needs to be solved is the increase the accessibility of a finance product by making it friendly and less specialized. The benefits of saving for the future is commonly understood, but not everyone has the habit to do that on a gradual, daily basis and keep it consistent. Also, low-income community might prioritize everyday spending than planning ahead, and the language of regular finance product might seem far away from their comfort zone. We wanted to design a product that does the job of making people save for their future, but at the same time does not require too much extra effort. Savings is integrated into existing behaviors (online shopping) and the act of saving is softened by paralleling it the familiar cultural habit of tipping.
Add up small tips, for your big future. tips. nudge the users into a good habit and avoid calling too much attention to itself. Please feel free to try out the user flow I designed and visualized above to get a sense of our vision, and check out our GitHub page to download the demo extension install package. Within 8 hours time, our developing team learned javascript and successfully managed to add a button to a live Amazon checkout page.