The Rabo PinPin app: Product development as co-creation between organization and customer at &ranj serious games
In this last blog of our series, we will discuss customer-centric product development in detail, providing a case example from &ranj, a gaming studio affiliated with &samhoud, specialized in driving behavioral change through serious games and gamification. The case discusses Rabo PinPin, a mobile phone banking application for children developed in co-creation between &ranj, &samhoud media, and the Dutch bank Rabobank.
Transformational purpose: Providing children with financial education and helping parents to communicate with their children about money
Pocket money is the most important touchpoint in childhood financial education. In a cashless society where money is increasingly transferred digitally, this learning experience disappears and money becomes abstract. Research shows that proper financial education is crucial for a healthy financial future. Rabo PinPin creates a common ground for parents and children to interact over financial topics. In order to make money less abstract, the development team decided to give it a face. PinPin is an augmented reality penguin that teaches children about finance both explicitly, through gamification and augmented reality, and implicitly, through stimulating a family dialogue on money. By creating a unique connection between the app’s gameplay and a child’s actual bank account, the developers were able to give kids safe, real-time access to their balance without them being able to actually spend money. Virtual in-game currency allows children to nurture PinPin by buying the character food, clothes and accessories. This way children get accustomed to making digital transactions. Parents can keep track of their child’s playing behavior through a special parent module. Since PinPin’s birth, 140.000 families have welcomed the penguin into their homes.
The thinking process towards the app started out with two problems that Rabobank was attempting to solve.
- Rabobank offers bank accounts tailored to the needs of children and teenagers. The bank wanted to link the use of these accounts to financial education to help children developing healthy financial behavior. Although financial behavior is developed at a very young age, there is not enough time and attention for learning about money and finances in school education. The resulting lack of financial literacy often leads to life-long poor financial decision making and is a crucial driver of debt.1
- Many adults are struggling to communicate with their children about money. Money has become largely immaterial due to cashless payments and the digitalization of banking. Young parents who still experienced material pocket money in the form of coins and bills feel lost in providing their children with a comparable tangible experience.
Given these problems, we can see that the app needs to serve several transformational purposes on different levels of granularity. On the abstract visionary level, it needs to contribute to society’s financial literacy and avoiding of debt. On the family level, it needs to help parents to share money with their children, make it a real experience, and engage in a dialogue with them about good financial behavior. On the individual level, the app needs to engage the child, be fun to play with, and help the child to understand what a bank account is and take care of their savings.
Creative product development at &ranj starts with a cross-functional team that includes customer representatives and all the expertise necessary to create and deliver the desired product
A cross-functional team at &ranj consists of people with the relevant creative and technological expertise such as game designers, visual designers and software engineers as well as several subject matter experts that provide knowledge and experience for this specific project depending on the goals of the project and the sector the customer is in. The customer is represented through the role of the product owner and a group of end-users of the game. Making the customer the product owner is crucial because it allows the customer to take responsibility for the product and steer its development. Frequently testing the product with end-users in the development process allows the team to adjust the products to the end-users needs and preferences.
Approaching the customer’s problem through design thinking
Design thinking is a process used in many Agile organizations to gain a profound understanding of the problem that the customer is dealing with and identify the jobs the product needs to get done to provide an adequate solution. Design thinking is a cyclical process that is repeated throughout the product development phase. It consists of five steps:
1. Understand: The team acquires an in-depth understanding of the problem space. This means approaching from different perspectives and fields of expertise.
2. Empathize: The team gets to know the end-users of the product, gaining an understanding of who they are, what they need, and what their problems are.
3. Define: Based on the knowledge and insights gathered in the first two steps, the team defines the customer’s problem in clear and unmistakable terms.
4. Ideate: Based on the definition of the problem, the team generates a host of different possible solutions.
5. Prototype: The team selects the best solution and creates a prototype of the product.
6. Test: The team releases the prototype to a group of end-users to test it and find out what works and what doesn’t.
In the course of the design thinking process, families of different constellations were invited for interviews and to play a number of prototype games that would help the product team to make hypotheses about the problems and obstacles that parents and children encounter around the subjects of money and banking. Prototypes at &ranj can for example be simple board game versions of the game. These are then tested with a group of around 10 end-users.
It was through this testing method that the product team identified that there was a lot of confusion among parents about how to handle pocket money and savings. The parents had received their pocket money in the forms of coins and bills when they were children themselves. They had learned to save by keeping some of their pocket money or birthday money in a piggy bank and then bringing it to an actual bank. Now they simply didn’t know to educate their own children towards financial literacy. The children were in a confusing situation too. While their parents did almost all of their transaction by card or online banking, their grandparents would still give them some cash occasionally. Through this experience, the product team realized that the app needed to enable the parents to give pocket money digitally and create a connection with the material piggy bank and the digital banking account of the child.
From prototype to minimum viable product to launch
Once the right prototype for the actual game has been found, the development team creates a first viable product i.e. an application with minimal necessary functionality of the game. The first viable product serves to elicit early market feedback through user data that provides the input for improvement to be implemented in the next iteration. During this process the team learns new insights about the end-user that haven’t become visible in early testing models and prototypes. For example, the mere naming or placing of a button in the wrong way can lead users to quit the game before they fully explored it.
“Your product isn’t finished when you launch, it begins when you launch.” - Marcus Vlaar, Co-founder and Creative Director &ranj
When a game is launched into the market, continuous learning and improving keeps going. Once the game is released, large amounts of user data are being collected. The combination of user data and qualitative research allows the development team to optimize the game further. For example, an early version of the game worked with physical markers to trigger the augmented reality representation of the penguin. Users could either print these markers out at home or get them at a local Rabobank branch. This turned out to be a hurdle for many users. Not everybody owns a printer and going to the bank to pick up the markers was too cumbersome and time-consuming. Consequently, the team improved the augmented reality function to allow for the character to be brought to life on any flat surface without markers. This improvement was greatly appreciated by users.
Thank you for reading!
In this blog series we have shown that customer centricity starts with an organization’s vision and transformational purpose. It is through the lens of vision and purpose that an organization needs to think about where and how it can create value for its individual customers. Internally, organizations need to establish a customer-centric mindset on all levels and enable employees to think in terms of what they can do to improve customer’s lives. Employees need to be given a structure in which they can communicate their ideas and experiment on them. Products need to be developed with dedicated product teams in continuous collaboration with the customer. The customer needs to take a role of responsibility in the product development process, such as the role of the product owner.
For traditional organizations, establishing this way of working requires fundamental organizational and behavioral change. At &samhoud we help organizations to execute this change successfully.
References
1 OECD paper: https://www.oecd.org/finance/financial-education/FinEdSchool_web.pdf