The problem that I was facing is that I budgeted and my kids did not. I thought to myself, how can I build a system that works for both parents and kids? While dreaming up this app I thought I might add some other features that might help parents and students enjoy their experience a bit more. One of the first areas I thought about was budgeting, teenagers live their lives in the moment and if they aren’t reminded they need to stay within a budget, they simply will not think about it.
I added their spending budget below every total so they remember “oh I need to stay within this budget”. My hope is that this teaches them to budget before they are out on their own having to learn budgeting as a crash course. I also wanted to make it feel like a restaurant app where they can order their food for the entire day and give them options to request overages. I added an AI learning mode that learns the students spending habits over a period of time and sets smart limits based on those habits. Future features include allowing the parents to be as hands-off or hands-on as they choose. For the parents that want their kids to just have everything they need then they can just connect their debit card and allow the kids to have what they want, for the parents that are on tight budgets they can have control over every aspect of the transactions as they need.
Every project starts with a style guide so that the vision of the project never strays far from its source, when and if you have a feeling it does you check back with your style guide. This is the style guide I created for Cafe Teria. I wanted it to be reminiscent of candy flavors, like skittles and starburst. These colors typically stand out to the younger crowd. the interface should remind them of things that they want to eat. Because of this, I went with a rainbow-like coloring scheme.
The final product feels bright and candy-like, which will appeal to kids who use the app, it will draw them in to want to use it. The app also appeals to parents that want to teach their students to budget. I chose green for the parent half of the app because the parents’ main interaction is money. The blue for the student was chosen because blue conveys stability and felt a little more grown-up, if anything I’ve learned as a parent of teenagers they want to be treated and seen more grown-up, combining the color with the teaching them to budget feels pretty on point for a teenager.
In the end, the interactions of the app make for a far superior app experience for both student and parent. For the student, they can pre-order their food for the day and have the freedom of requesting overages and the parent has the ability to set budgets on the account.