How I Designed a 0-1 Savings App

I joined 2 years after Long Game was founded and was the sole designer on the team. The app was simple with minimal lottery-style games and a basic savings account.

The initial design left a lot to be desired. The app lacked a cohesive brand and there weren't many features to keep users engaged, so we got to work on building out a larger feature-set and revamping the design.

First, I collaborated with CEO & CTO to craft a vision for the future of Long Game. We roadmapped several additions to the app:

• Bite-sized missions inspired by behavioral science to keep up momentum and reduce overwhelm when saving
• Your financial life on a personalized map, guiding you to your goals
• Non-monetary mechanisms to inspire engagement like levels, rewards, and boosts

We built these updates in a series of bundles to maintain momentum and keep users excited about a steady stream of new features. I focused deeply on the design process for each bundle before passing it off to engineering:

• Bundle 1: Levels, Brains (engagement currency, separate from Coins), and bite-sized missions
• Bundle 2: Cards to communicate with the user, Game Center for a central place for finding mini-games, and savings streak rewards
• Bundle 3: Journey Map to visually track progress with the goal to have the user’s entire financial life be trackable here one day

Around this time, we redeveloped our brand identity to a more youthful aesthetic. This differentiated us from traditional banks, with hopes of attracting a younger demographic. This included:

• A new logo, tagline, and art direction
• A simplified yet vibrant palette
• A unified design system with a cohesive visual style
• Themed games that were more tied into the overall style

I managed an external consultancy, Supernova design team, in developing the brand logo and style guide, and then implemented it across the app's design system.

After the success of missions, we decided to go deeper in on a personalized savings experience.

I began by conducting market research, and came up with savings jars to act as an envelope system for users to save for multiple ongoing goals, similar to popular budgeting apps like YNAB.

Savings jars allowed users to plan out future savings goals and track their progress, and were some of the first steps toward enabling users to map out their financial future in the app.

Long Game users were in love with the app, but we were having trouble acquiring new users at a sustainable rate. Our core demographics, Millenials and Gen Z, were highly active online, so we focused on features that would spread via word of mouth.

• Exclusive player-vs-player games through connecting with in-app friends
• Personable, customizable avatars to give players a sense of emotional connection
• Referral rewards and bonuses

In an effort to make crypto more accessible to our users during the rise of the crypto boom, we offered 3 types of cryptocurrencies. These were winnable in crypto games and were held until a user initiated transfer to an outside wallet.

This feature was very successful early on and helped us reach a new demographic of users, but eventually became a liability as the crypto market became more volatile.

One key issue that came up was that our users wanted to use us as their primary bank, but couldn't because we only offered savings accounts. We decided to partner with nbkc bank to offer a checking account and debit card, turning Long Game into a full fledged neo-bank.

• Revenue increased through debit transactions
• Value add through more account rewards

This also helped a long-standing pain point potential users had with Long Game: access and trust. Users were more likely to trust a bank that they could easily access via a debit card, and partnering with a brick and mortar, FDIC insured bank also helped users feel more secure.

By 2019, the app was successful but had some issues with user engagement and retention. Some of the earlier experiments such as Brains had been confusing to users, and the games themselves were repetitive. We hired a game designer to help us refine the core loop of the app and address these issues.

We started by removing several polarizing and failing features, such as creatures and Brains, and we created a “Daily Game” to improve engagement and retention:

• Play 1x per day for extra Coins
• Earn Streaks and Boosts
• Win mystery chests for engaging regularly

One of the key issues we faced was that our games had to be "games of chance" to comply with sweepstakes laws. These constraints led to game experiences that felt boring an repetitive, without a sense of accomplishment.

In collaboration with our Game Designer, I led the creative direction of a variety of new games to address this. We started by launching over 40 games with unique sweepstakes options for Coin and Cash wins. Then, we began roadmapping a "metagame" where users could progress outside of the sweepstakes challenges.

While users could not progress and gain advantages in the games themselves, we wanted to give them a sense of progression and achievement. We started focusing on a "metagame" based on the financial roadmap we had started with the Journey Map.

Users would be able to gain more levels and rewards by achieving their savings goals. These rewards were non-monetary, but provided other benefits like unlockable avatars and collectibles. Long term, we planned to offer non-chance based games where these items could provide direct value to the player in-game.

With the global pandemic, we were forced to focus on profitability as our runway was running out and funding was becoming harder to secure. We realized that our current debit transactions were not getting us to profitability, so we needed to find other solutions to maintain runway.

We experimented with a tiered approach to offer boosts for Direct Deposit options, or a pay-to-use bottom tier.

The concept was well received in user tests, but it wasn’t the right fit for user retention in the end.

We shifted focus to partner directly with traditional banks, enabling users to register with Long Game via their existing bank accounts.

• Short term: Affiliate Offers
• Long term: offer Long Game as a user acquisition and retention service for other banks

We launched Long Game Rewards in December 2020 and partnered with 12 banks for our initial offering. However, one of our partner's decided that they wanted a more exclusive arrangement: Truist Bank.