Money Heroes; building a platform for Young Enterprise to inspire half a million money savvy kids
Services: Digital strategy | UX and design | Software engineering
Money Heroes is a free financial education programme for children aged 3-11 years old. Parents, teachers and educators use the platform’s resources to guide young people towards better financial literacy.
The application's original build lacked a number of features which would help users get maximum educational value from the experience. Fluent were approached to add in the missing elements, and implement some entirely new ones.
Now, Money Heroes has reached an impressive 465,136 young people, by working with over 2,500 schools & organisations and supporting over 3,400 educators and 10,700 parents. We’re proud to keep on supporting them with their evolving product development needs.
Financial education for life
95% of people aged 16-24 believe money management is a skill that can be learned. But 85% get absolutely no financial education from school. To fix this, Young Enterprise (supported by HSBC UK) took on the challenge to get kids talking about finance.
The first iteration of the Money Heroes platform was created by another agency. It worked, but there was a whole wishlist of features that didn’t make it into the first version.
A conversation with Fluent’s Wes Cole explored our track record with nonprofits like CAMFED and Become. It showed we could definitely fill those development gaps. But they also loved our willingness to partner for the long term, not simply on one project.
Their vision was for an ongoing relationship where we could get intimately acquainted with what makes the platform tick. That’s the kind of job we like. In March 2021, with the service already in active daily use, we got down to business.
Discovery: Laying the groundwork
This project involved a thorough discovery process. Three days of consultancy and workshops, along with a week of stakeholder interviews, gave us the grounding we needed. We could now produce a set of low-fidelity wireframes to blueprint the platform’s missing elements:
- The ability to embed resources like ebooks and podcasts into the site
- Expanded options to let teachers manage their school's information and organise multiple groups
- Easier editing of a school or organisation's details in the CMS
- Contact and order forms for parents and teachers to order physical resources
A second three-day phase of discovery brought us deeper into Money Heroes’ technical workings. This period laid the groundwork for building the required product features. By the end of these three days, we’d:
- Set up automated deployments in Azure DevOps
- Set up a test and preview environment
- Investigated adding automated integration tests
- Investigated simplifying the deployment architecture
With all that prep done, we started on 35 days of intensive development. Improvements to resource and account management were followed by a support and maintenance period. We then got to work improving Money Heroes’ Strapi CMS reporting system.
The existing setup had a basic reporting structure, enough to measure most of their KPIs. But creating a report meant downloading all the platform’s user data and editing it offline. Not only was that a pain in the neck, it was also a security risk.
We also spotted gaps in the reporting. There was no link between users and activities, for example. It took extra manual work to see how the overall programme was performing at any given time.
When these 35 days were over, we’d:
- Added the ability to download time-specific data
- Applied bookmarks to track each user’s progress through activities
- Let users set their full download preferences once at registration
We continue to feel in safe hands with Fluent. All developments and designs to date have helped to improve the website and continue to improve the user journey for our participants. The programme is constantly evolving, and Fluent always understand what we are trying to achieve and make this possible with technology behind the scenes. We look forward to continuing to learn and evolve the website as the reach of the programme grows.
Accessibility audit
In September 2022, AbilityNet, a third-party organisation, carried out a desktop and mobile accessibility audit of the Money Heroes website. The audit highlighted specific implementation changes required to improve the website's accessibility for all its visitors; parents, teachers, children etc.
With the guidance of the audit, Fluent's skilled UX and Design team took on the task of addressing the issues, with a focus on improving the website's design, layout, functionality, and user interface.
After a collaborative process, the accessibility points identified in the September 2022 audit were successfully achieved. As a result, the Money Heroes program has a more inclusive and user-friendly online platform.
Ensuring that a digital product is accessible regardless of a person's disability is important. However, there are lots of myths out there surrounding the topic. That’s why, Fluent have created a blog post that aims to debunk 4 of the most common digital accessibility myths out there.
Futureproofing the platform
By December 2021, the Money Heroes team had made the decision to simplify their platform’s architecture. We were asked to help improve the service’s availability, performance, cost-effectiveness and scalability by:
- Putting the static public site into an Azure Storage account
- Moving the administration (Strapi) site to Azure App Service
- Modifying DevOps processes to remove the Azure Container Registry, allowing more flexible deployments
This work was accompanied by design changes to the public-facing site. A meaty strategy and design process led to the build and implementation in April 2022. Since then, our relationship has only gotten stronger.
Ongoing support, new features and continuous improvements let Money Heroes keep exploring ways to help kids get money smart. Whatever elements the platform needs, they know they can count on us.
Could your digital product benefit from the same kind of close working relationship?
Our team want to hear all about where you’re at, where you’re going and how we can help you succeed.