Redeem: A Mobile Budgeting App for Released Inmates
Redeem is a proposed budgeting application designed for recently released prison inmates. I collaborated with three teammates to develop high-fidelity wireframes, user personas, and a full, 25-minute presentation of our design.
Our full presentation can be found here!
Team Members & Roles
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Samantha Gillyard, Malenda Gleaton, Benjamin Pittman, Lani Regelbrugge
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Literature review
Developing user personas
Designing and mapping out key app features
Presentation slides & theme
Preliminary Research & Literature Review
Before we started brainstorming our design, we wanted to get a better understanding of our target audience, as well as any factors influencing their financial situation and ability to budget effectively. To accomplish this, we conducted a literature review on the following topics in regard to recently released inmates:
Socioemotional characteristics
Cognitive characteristics
Perceptual or motor characteristics
Through our research, we identified some key characteristics that may impact our target audience’s ability to budget effectively, which are summarized in the photos below.
Moving into the next phase of our design process, there were 3 main takeaways from our research that heavily influenced our subsequent design decisions:
Support from family/friends is one of the most important factors that affects a recently released individual’s success upon reentry into society.
Individuals suffering from mental or physical impairments are likely to have trouble seeking proper care.
Individuals may lack financial literacy and lack a comprehensive understanding of available resources.
User Personas
As our next step, we decided that user personas would be helpful for visualizing our users during the design process. Based on information from our literature review, we developed the following three user personas:
While developing our user personas, we tried to cover the most common issues that our target users may experience. Formerly released inmates are an incredibly vast and diverse population, so we rather than focusing on individual traits, we built personas based on feelings and experiences.
Reentry into society after serving time in the prison system can be very overwhelming, for a number of reasons. Finances may be at the forefront of the struggles our users face, but social difficulties like forming or repairing relationships can cause a significant amount of stress as well. Upon release, former inmates may be in poor mental and physical health as a result of harsh conditions and inadequate medical care, which can make it even more difficult to support themselves, financially or otherwise.
For me personally, I had felt passionate about this project from the start. However, creating backstories for these personas really helped me envision the people that this app could provide support for. This step in the process made me feel much more connected to our users, which was very helpful as we moved forward and started designing.
Brand Visual Concepts
At this point in the journey, my collaborators and I were beginning to see how this idea wasn’t just about budgeting— it was about helping an underrepresented group with their difficult reentry into society.
As we moved into the final phases of our design process, we had several brainstorming sessions where we each expressed our main considerations for the overall app design and ideas we wanted to include. We narrowed these down into our “big ideas”, beginning with broader visual concepts and developing our “brand”.
Logo
Friendly font
Lowercase for relaxed feel
Period to indicate action
Colors
Warm colors for positivity and optimism
“Dawn” of a new day
Cool colors for finance aspects— feelings of security
Gradient represents change
Tagline
Clear and concise
Focuses on self-improvement
Iconography
Simple, clean, colorful icons
Candid photos appear friendly and welcoming; represent a “better you”
Warm tones for positivity
Slight gradient overlay to represent change
High-Fidelity Wireframes
App Start/Sign-In
Initial Sign-Up
Main Dashboard
“Chance”: AI HelpBot
After developing our broad visual concepts, we picked out a few key workflows and developed high-fidelity wireframes. This was the final step in our design process.