Swipe n' Sweep
MY ROLE
As my final project at USC, my team was asked to create an app that would address an existing problem for students. So we created Swipe n’ Sweep — your personal subscription manager that helps you stay organized and save money all in one place.
PROCESS: RESEARCH
As a team, we defined that our primary market would be students and lower income families, who we thought would benefit most from using the app.
We conducted surveys, interviews, field studies, and card sorting to better understand our users.
Research showed that
The majority of the users cannot recall how many subscriptions they have, let alone the amount per subscription.
The majority of the users do not track their subscriptions spendings.
Being able to track paid versus unpaid subscriptions is equally important to users.
Those with children cared about how much their children were spending on subscriptions.
With this information, we created two personas.
Devin grew up in a wealthy family. Devin is the lead guitarist in a band, as a result, he subscribes to a lot of music making software. He just graduated this spring, and is currently looking for a job in the music industry. It’s been a couple months, and Devin still hasn’t found a job. He must budget wisely, this includes limiting his spending on subscriptions each month.
Behaviors:
Subscribes to services on impulse
Likes to try new tools, plans to unsubscribe after playing with it but forgets
Pain Points:
Struggles to budget money well
Cannot remember all his subscriptions
Often forgets his usernames / passwords to those subscriptions
Not sure which subscription to cancel, based on usage
Would hate to track everything manually
Opportunities [ for Swipe n’ Sweep]:
Manage all subscriptions with one app
All payments and login stored with a secure encryption
Devin can see his total monthly spending, also a breakdown of how often he uses the service
Provide an “explore” feature, where Devin would be notified of new music services
Scenario: Devin just discovered that Adobe Music is coming out. He would like to subscribe to it, but it is not part of his budget. He opens the Swipe n’ Sweep app to view his paid subscriptions. He finds out that he has two streaming services, when in reality he needs one. He decides to cancel one of the streaming services, and subscribes to Adobe Music without going over his budget.
Antonio is a father of two. He is saving money for his sons’ college tuitions. He is not very tech savvy, but he does have two smartphones — one for personal use, one for his work. Antonio only has a few subscriptions, but his sons, who sometimes uses his smartphones, often subscribes to a lot.
Behaviors:
Trying to save money
Tends to subscribe to free services that do send a lot of emails
hates advertisements
Pain Points:
Want to see all his spending in one place
Wants to clean his inbox with junk mail
Wants transparency on what his kids are subscribing and spending on his account
Opportunities [ for Swipe n’ Sweep]:
Allows him to cancel any subscriptions unknown to him
Allows him to unsubscribe to emails
Clearer view of his monthly spending for him and his sons
Scenario: Antonio’s son recently broke his phone, and he himself is saving phone to buy the new phone. But since Antonio has two phones, he has agreed to lend it to his son temporary. A couple weeks later, when budgeting he found out that he was spending more than usual; there were expenses on his account unknown to him. He called his bank, and said that the charges did come from his account. After trying to figure it out on his own, he finally resorted to downloading Swipe n’ Sweep. Immediately he identified the recent charges — his kids made subscribed to multiple services. With a few clicks, he canceled the subscriptions. He also set the app to “Allow Notifications”; this way he would be the first to know of any new charges. With the app, Antonio is able to manage all his subscriptions easily.
Along with conducting user research, we also conducted a competitive analysis to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
After better understanding the users’ pain points and needs, we analyzed our competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. There were similarities, but no other competitors emphasized on the managerial aspect.
PROCESS: DESIGN
The wireframes when showed to the users were well received.
Swipe n’ Sweep has four main features:
Managing Unpaid Email Subscriptions
Managing Paid Subscriptions
Breakdown of Subscription Usage
Up to Date List of Subscriptions
The purpose of this app is not to discourage people from subscribing, rather encourage people to manage their subscriptions wisely to be best suit their needs.
The only concern, however, was privacy and securities issues. “How do I know that my personal information and credit card number is kept confidential?"
Users did not feel comfortable giving out credit card(s) or bank information solely for “viewing” purchase. So instead, we provided an additional path. The user could either add their credit card / bank information or share their information through the subscriptions themselves, with permission granted of course.
RESULTS
Swipe n’ Sweep will compile Devin’s monthly subscription spending in one place to help him make informed decisions. For Antonio, Swipe n’ Sweep will make it easy for him to cancel unused or unnecessary subscriptions.
With a market that craves organization and transparency, this app is moving in the right direction.