Nestlums
Mobile app designed to help young children grasp the concept of digital money in a safe environment through interactive gameplay.
Financial Literacy
Nestlums is an app designed to help young children grasp the concept of how money works, long before they own a smartphone or have their own bank account.
Prepare your little ones for the real world with the assistance of a race of conscientious creatures called the Nestlums, who like nothing better than to count pocket money, work toward savings goals, and play games which revolve around numeracy.
We designed Nestlums in collaboration with the financial technology company Thought Machine.
Making Money Teach
Our approach was to build a pocket money balance and task tracker that sat alongside an educational game. Most importantly, we decided that there was to be no connection to bank accounts at all — this simple approach was celebrated by parents looking for a simple way to manage pocket money and a stark comparison to other applications.
In Nestlums, numbers take a back seat to interactions. The important thing was to get children using money and to do that, they had to fall in love with the world around them.
This couldn’t be a replica of a banking application with a rounded typeface and softer colour palette, it needed to explore the connection with money more deeply with a focus on playful interactions.
One of our favourite interactions is completing a task by drawing over the tick and smashing the egg to get out the reward.
“As parents it is a great way to educate the younger kids about pocket money especially being able to choose the reward as either money or gems.”
– Apple AppStore
Findings
Nestlums was a product that focused on the real world utility of saving pocket money to generate the gems players needed to proceed in the game world.
Because of this mechanic, parents had a safe environment where their children could fail with digital money and also a real world component that drove the gameplay experience.
This meant that Nestlums didn’t stop when parents closed the game. The next chore of washing up or tidying a bedroom could have an impact on the childrens next objective in the game world.
This kind of connection became an interesting outcome we hadn’t expected, the digital currency of the game had a feeling of real world effort! A decision such as buying a new outfit for you Nestlums came with the weight of effort that had gone into getting the gems in the first place.
