Beyond the Allowance: Redefined Parental Engagement and Boosted Registrations by 34%
End-to-end
Mobile
UI Design
User Interviews
Zywa is a digital banking app that provides teens in the UAE with their own payment cards and money management tools. Parents can send money to their teens, while teens can use their Zywa cards to make purchases, transfer funds, and receive money.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Duration
Research: 3 weeks
Design: 2 weeks
Impact
↑34% parent sign-ups
Skills
Product Strategy/ User Interviews/ UI Design/ User Feedback
BACKGROUND 🔍
Zywa parents were limited to sending money and setting allowances or challenges for their kids. We realized we were overlooking them as a key user group by not offering tailored features to make the app more valuable for them.
Thus, the parent-side redesign focused on making parents feel confident and connected. By adding trust-building UI updates and an Insights feature to track spending habits, we gave parents the tools they needed to stay informed without overstepping their child's independence. This thoughtful approach led to a 34% boost in parent registrations within one month.
SPRINT GOAL 🎯
Redefining and elevating parent’s role from overseers to active partners in their child’s financial journey through trust and engagement.
THE PROBLEM 🚨
It started with our support getting spammed...
"How do I convince my parents to get me a Zywa card?","My parents don’t trust Zywa" — these were daily concerns our customer support team (including myself) encountered. While we had a CS protocol in place, it mainly resulted in more support tickets and manual responses.
We realized that our efforts were focused on equipping teens with resources to persuade their parents, but the bigger issue was clear—new and potential parents had little to no reason to trust an app that lets their teen spend money.
It was clear - parents didn’t know whether Zywa was legit.
The support queries revealed a fundamental challenge — gaining parents' trust was essential for the app’s growth and user adoption.
As the primary decision-makers in their children’s financial journeys, parents needed a seamless and trustworthy experience that addressed their concerns. The existing parent-facing app didn’t offer the right balance of oversight and autonomy.
The numbers backed our assumption..
While the constant stream of support tickets made it clear there was an issue, we needed to dive deeper to understand just how big of a problem it really was. We then set out to look at the data. To measure motivation, we used the type of user who installed the app first—child or parent—as a proxy.
Analyzing our installation data confirmed this—over 90% of sign-ups started with the teen, followed by the parent. This indicated that teens found more value in Zywa, while parents had little incentive to introduce it to their child.
We advocated for parents as primary users!
As we analyzed the data, it became clear that parents weren’t eager to join Zywa. Apart from trust building UI tweaks, I pointed out that this was because we weren’t offering anything specifically designed for them.
Before the redesign, parents could only transfer money, set allowances, and assign chores. To truly engage them, we needed to introduce parent-centric features that positioned them as primary users rather than just secondary ones.
By providing more value to parents, we could not only enhance their experience but also build greater trust in the app.
So we spoke to a few parents…
To test our hypotheses, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 2 sets of parent categories:
Zywa Parents
Reluctant Parents (teens of which wanted the app)
For Zywa parents, our focus was on understanding their current experience—what worked, what didn’t, and what additional features they wished they had. This helped us identify gaps in functionality and opportunities to enhance their engagement.
On the other hand, with reluctant parents, we aimed to uncover their perceptions of financial apps for teens. We explored what factors influenced their trust in a new money app and at what point they felt comfortable introducing their child to one.
…and confirmed our hypothesis
Two major emerging themes came out of our conversations with parents. While we were working on fixing onboarding before this; we also got more intel that validated our onboarding issues
Our data suggested another key input
One major roadblock parents faced out of trust issues was verifying their Emirates ID. This process was required by our banking partner and neither a parent nor a child could activate their account without verifying one.
THE SOLUTION 💡
So we set to empower our parents
One major roadblock parents faced out of trust issues was verifying their Emirates ID. This process was required by our banking partner and neither a parent nor a child could activate their account without verifying one.
Added elements of assurance for FTUE
For parents, we concluded that the process needs to be straightforward and their first time experience with the app should answer all their concerns. So for the First Time User experience we designed a revamped home screen for onboarding.
Indicated the number of active users and added an image of a zywa family to build their confidence
Provided a list of FAQs that would help solve the most common inhibitions among parents
Added a component that adds to the legitimacy of zywa
We also reduced their confusion
After hearing about onboarding issues in interviews, we focused on making the process as simple as possible while still allowing users to explore the app and get to know Zywa.
Provided insights as a new feature
To position parents as primary users of the app, we introduced the insights feature, directly addressing the common feedback we gathered during interviews. Parents just wanted to be in the know and have a bird’s-eye view of where their child was spending.
Simple expense overview
Expense category overview
Overview of overtime savings
and revamped existing features
Allowances, savings, and challenges were already a part of the parent side of the app. We designed a dashboard of these too so that the parent can get a second layer of visibility of their child’s financial habits.
hand-held them at every opportunity
Seeing that parents wanted more context, we introduced story-based onboarding for each feature to guide first-time users.
...and a little more hand-holding
We also focused on multiple edge cases in order to communicate clearly how the insights feature will work. And this is how it looks to a first time parent user!
THE RESULTS 📊
The redesign made sense!
We tracked the number of parents with connected child users over the following weeks and saw an increase. Our goal with this redesign was to encourage more parents to connect their child, and the results showed positive progress.
THE CONCLUSION 🚀
What I learned from this sprint
After the launch of the redesign, conversations with parent users revealed a noticeable shift in their confidence and satisfaction with the app. Their feedback highlighted how the updates addressed their concerns, solidifying the redesign as a step in the right direction. These insights reaffirmed the importance of user-centric design in building trust and fostering long-term engagement.
The grind doesn't stop here!
Explore some of my other projects.
You can reach out to me at adesh169@pratt.edu
Copyright © 2024 Areen Deshmukh | Last updated February 2025
