Looking at Wesabe’s business model, so far they have stayed away from using advertising or leveraging demographic data. According to Wesabe’s CEO, Marc Hedlund, the company plans to continue offering basic services free, and start introducing premium services, designed to add value in exchange for a subscription fee. In a recent interview, Hedlund said, “The challenge, of course, is that many banks provide those services for free. But we have some ideas on how to make this experience that much better at Wesabe to make a low fee appealing enough to users that want it.” [1]

This is a fascinating challenge, considering that if you want to build a business model off add-on services during a down economy, you really have to understand what makes your customers tick. It comes down to the strength of your core value proposition and how well you can deliver your customer experience.

In tough economic times, we need to look beyond just cutting costs and ask ourselves: What kinds of experiences would this young generation of users be willing to pay for during a time when they are facing the biggest economic challenge of their lives? What kinds of needs will they gravitate towards? How can you best address those needs and make it economically sustainable?

[1] Source: Article from Ars Technica

Becks Beer
Becks encourages you to explore and peek through its doors into some of the most intimate questions and thoughts posted by Becks fans. Choose your answer and find out how “normal” your choices are…well, that is, compared with those crazy German beer drinkers out there.

Hotel 626
This is a no-nonsense, frightening site. If you scare easily, do not enter! You can only enter the hotel from 6pm to 6am and you’re immediately thrown into an haunted hotel game that’s a bite-sized horror movie experience. Hotel 626 was released as part of Doritos Snack Strong Productions, though no one is sure how it has anything to do with Doritos (unless you’re as scared by the health factor of their chips as we are).

HBO Voyeur
This is the future of entertainment! HBO outdid itself in finding the right balance between the entertainment provided by modern television, the rich visuals of silent movies and the engagement and freedom of website navigation. If Becks allows you to glimpse into other people’s thoughts, HBO Voyeur does something similar by letting you peak into other people’s windows. HBO breaks new ground as it introduces you to a fictional but still voyeuristic New York. The site is full of stories about heartbreak and impossible victories and stories that just have quirky humor. Best of all, the site leaves you with questions. Lots of questions! It’s for the inner voyeur in all of us. It’s hard to say how expensive the production is, but the production value is INCREDIBLE. On this site you are given interesting neighbors and free reign to shamelessly watch the juicy bits of their lives around you.

Don’t Click It!
Is this the future of website interaction? No clicks. No buttons. Just simple movements with the pointer to get you from information point A to B. The site is a lot of fun and is thought-provoking, as it suggests what can be done when you think a little outside of the traditional website design box.

Turbochef
“It dices, it slices, it makes every meal perfect!” Okay, so the guy on this site does sounds a bit like an infomercial, but the visual information and flash animation is as professional as we have seen. If you peek into the oven, you will see the designers use large and clear graphics to break down the complicated engineering behind this “unbelievable” machine into a mix of quick animations and still design. We are starting to see a lot people green-screened into websites these days to explain a company’s product or service. Look at this example to see how to bridge new ways to use video with the familiar graphics of web design.

With all the potential for websites to become more interactive in the next few years, enjoy and have fun!

Trying to get your finances under control can be an extremely stressful and overwhelming process. Throw in the worst economic downturn Generation Y has ever faced, and you’ve got a whole generation crying out for something to offer them a sense of control and stability.

Wesabe has a key opportunity to support these needs while emphasizing their core strength at integrating community into the money management process. In our redesign of their website service, we introduce the concept of Budget Buddies, friends in the Wesabe community who loosely act as your financial support group. With a daily feed of updates, you can see new goals, tips and requests posted by your more intimate community.

3Strand Concept Design – Budget Buddies

My Challenges is a feature that brings some friendly competition onto this social networking scene. Challenge a group of your friends to each “give up your Starbucks latte three days a week until April.” As Wesabe tracks your daily transactions, you can see who’s closest to keeping to their goals and winning the challenge. Make the hurdle of “saving money” less about strict abstinence and more about trash-talking with friends, with built-in community accountability. At the end of the challenge, you can see that you’ve already saved $50, and if you choose to continue with this habit, you could save an extra $500 by the end of the year.

3Strand Concept Design – My Challenges

Or maybe you’ve been eyeing the new BlackBerry Storm, but it’s not within your budget. Add it as a wish list item, and your account will automatically put any extra budget money towards this future purchase. Being able to track these challenges and goals gives you an easy and stress-free way to have control over your money.

The comparative Scorecard aspect of money management also brings up typical questions like:

What are people like me spending?
Am I paying too much for rent for my area?
How are others like me saving?

A critical part of these questions is the comparison to others of a similar age, location, or profession, who tend to have similar living styles and preferences. The Savings Board feature allows you to see how others like you are spending or saving, based on your own personalized search filters. So if you are in your 20s and very socially active, you get saving ideas for how to save money while staying social, such as “cook meals with friends during the week.” You can also compare your monthly spending habits to those of others like you, to see how you measure up to your peers.

About a week ago I saw a post of the sound the Voyager Satellite has been picking up as it passes through our universe. There is no sound in space but the radio frequencies are picked up by the satellite and then turned into sound. The best recording I could find happens to be from Uranus, and being posted by an individual who advocates that blips in the video are from aliens. I listened closely to the blips to hear what an alien sounds like and apparently aliens sound just like my phone’s call waiting.

After tracking down campaign posters for every president since 1900, we found a few things that surprised us:

– Wow, the artwork on Theodore Roosevelt’s poster could practically have been used in this last election.

– Jimmy Carter so far is the only President in history to have not used red, white and blue on his poster.

Here are the posters:

Theodore Roosevelt, 1901-1909
SLOGAN: “We stand at Armageddon and fight for the Lord.”

William Howard Taft, 1909-1913
SLOGAN: “Vote for Taft now, you can vote for Bryan anytime”

Woodrow Wilson, 1913-1921
SLOGAN: “He proved the pen mightier than the sword”

Warren Gamaliel Harding, 1921-1923
SLOGAN: “Back to normalcy”

Calvin Coolidge, 1923-1929
SLOGAN: “Keep cool with Coolidge”

Herbert Clark Hoover, 1929-1933
SLOGAN: “Hoo but Hoover?”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933-1945
SLOGAN: “I propose (to the American people) a New Deal”

Harry S. Truman, 1945-1953
SLOGAN: “The Buck Stops Here”

Dwight David Eisenhower 1953-1961
SLOGANS: “I like Ike” and “I still like Ike”

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1961-1963
SLOGAN: “A time for greatness”

Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1963-1969
SLOGAN: “All the way with LBJ”

Richard Milhous Nixon, 1969-1974
SLOGAN: “For the future”

This Andy Warhol poster campaigned against Nixon.

Gerald Rudolph Ford, 1974-1977
SLOGAN: “He’s making us proud again”

James Earl Carter, Jr., 1977-1981
SLOGAN: “A Leader, for a Change”

Ronald Wilson Reagan, 1981-1989
SLOGAN: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

George Herbert Walker Bush, 1989-1993
SLOGAN: “Kinder, Gentler Nation “

William Jefferson Clinton, 1993-2001
SLOGANA: “It’s Time to Change America” and “It’s The Economy, Stupid”

George Walker Bush, 2001-2009
SLOGAN: “Don’t swap horses in midstream”

Barack Hussein Obama, 2009
SLOGAN: “Yes We Can”

This week we’re continuing with our redesign of Wesabe.com, a money management/social networking site. Shown below is our redesign concept for Wesabe’s member homepage. Catering to Generation Y’s needs, our design approach is to make the homepage feel simple, fresh and a bit playful.

3Strand Concept Member Homepage Design for Wesabe.com

For the first level of information, we lay ouy a visually-driven status snapshot of areas important to this demographic: budget, bills, account and goals. Items turn orange when they reach a level where you need to be alerted (eg. exceeding your budget, increased debt, upcoming bills).

The large green tab at the right highlights the unique Web 2.0 features that Wesabe offers, showing your personalized tags for items you’ve bought, as well as daily money-saving tips and goals from the community. Using a Flash rollover feature, the green tab pulls back to reveal the next level of information: your recent interactions with your social network on Wesabe.

3Strand’s Concept Features for Wesabe:
Future Forecasting and Education

We found that very few money management sites offer any form of future forecasting. Since these sites are supposed to be about making your life easier, we designed the Sneak Peak feature. It targets simple questions about the future that young people are already thinking (but feel clueless about), and allows them to map out the possibilities on an interactive graph.

“How long will it take me to be able to afford a house?”
“Should I buy or rent?”
“Is it better for me to maintain some credit card debt or pay it all off now?”
“How can I pay off my loans faster?”
“How can I save $2500 over the next 5 months?”

3Strand Concept Design – Sneak Peak

Based on stored information (eg. income, average monthly spending, APR), this feature gives you a non-intimidating way to calculate and play out potential future scenarios. Now you can explore different future paths and learn better ways to plan for it.

As with many other sites, our design also lets you set your monthly budget targets and see your status of spending in each category. Some sites are now able to provide a notification to you when you’ve exceeded your budget in a certain category. Unfortunately, this alone is not enough to help you understand what you can still do to rein in your overall budget. Most Generation Y users we polled said that they don’t mind if they overspend a bit in certain categories, but they still have a strong desire to feel “in control” of their money. Making money management more interactive and under your control, we introduce a new budget feature.

Halfway through the month and already overspent your monthly shopping budget? But perhaps you haven’t spent as much on going out to bars yet. Simply drag and drop the overspent box to reallocate the money to your budget for bars or any other categories you can try to cut back on for the rest of the month.

3Strand Concept Design – Budget

You will be notified if you are consistently overspending or underspending in certain categories, so you can tailor your budget to best fit your needs. This allows you to set realistic goals and have a clear picture of whether you are saving or exceeding your overall budget each month.

3Strand Concept Design – Budget Trends

Finally, what’s a realistic budget without adding in occasional guilty pleasures? Customize your My Guilty Pleasures list for items you will occasionally want to splurge on.  If you’ve been doing well with saving up, you randomly get pop-up rewards through Wesabe, allotting a portion of your budget to a guilty pleasure of your choice!

3Strand Concept Design – Guilty Pleasures

Next week, we’ll explore more concept features we’ve developed for Wesabe, focusing on building in support groups and competition elements to the user interface. We’d love to know your thoughts and ideas.

And the winner is…WESABE!

Wesabe is a relative rookie (started late 2005), but is also the first mover in its industry to really start integrating web 2.0 into personal finance. In about three years, it has created a strong social network of hundreds of thousands of Generation Y users and has shown tremendous growth. While compared with veterans such as Quicken, Wesabe is still a fledgling in its function and feature capabilities, but it’s in a position to have the most potential to grow and reshape the industry. Now for the fun stuff.

Here is a snapshot of Wesabe’s current website design:

Wesabe’s CURRENT homepage

We were so excited when we heard about their fresh approach to personal finance, that when we signed up for an account and went to their site, we felt a bit let down. Our first impression from using Wesabe’s site is that it looks as though it was designed by programmers. The tabs, subject headings and tags are all there and functional, but it does not feel as though there was as much thought given to the design, layout or usability. In such a competitive market, with strong entrants like Mint and PNC’s Virtual Wallet, this simply won’t cut it for long. As a service that focuses on user-generated content, Wesabe will need to give more attention to the user’s engagement and ease of interaction with the site.

In our redesign, we wanted to make sure we kept key aspects of Wesabe’s Web 2.0-savvy brand elements:

• a strong visual presence of user interaction on the site
• emphasis on tagging spending categories
• user comments and speech bubbles
• simple layouts and color schemes

Focusing on the target Generation Y users, we also wanted to make the site feel youthful, easy and relevant to their needs. Much of this younger population struggles with credit card debt, student loans and trying to find tangible ways to save. They draw upon Internet social networks to encourage each other and offer tips on how to reach their financial goals.

Below is a sneak peak at how we would approach redesigning Wesabe’s home page. We’ll go into the detail of the designs and features next week. Stay tuned.

1) GakuDesign’s Layered Cake
We wanted use this cake to highlight one of the most important the concepts in our design process: creating the element of surprise. Playing with different shades of chocolate and fun asymmetric layering, this cake saves the pleasant surprise for when you cut into it.

2) Tithi Kutchamuch Chocolate Bar

This chocolate bar has a great application of simple design through its playful use of negative space. Incidentally, it also saves you about 30% on calories, without sacrificing an ounce of the fun behind the chocolate-eating experience.

3) DeLafee Gold Chocolate
Zeroing in on the key ingredients for luxury and indulgence, DeLafee combines two of the most sensual pleasures in the world: Swiss chocolate and 24 karat edible gold. Why not?

4) Scorpion Vodka

How about an after-dinner aperitif?  Said to remove toxins from the body, this adventurous concoction uses real scorpions that will be sure to get conversation going again after a post-turkey coma.

5) The Pie Cake

Marti Guixe, a self titled “techno-gastrosof, tapaist and ex-designer,” created these cakes to showcase the proportions of the ingredients by the pie chart on the top. While this is definitely a fun play on information design, the part that is really striking is the precision of the angles and layers. Both the interior and exterior look as though they have been extruded from industrial-grade metal.

Shades of the Sunset Pendant
We found the warm, twisting color gradient of this pendant unique and striking. However, while we love the pendant, the website gives off the feel of a late-night infomercial selling Obama dinner plates, and does not encourage customer trust. As is the case for many social enterprises, the website experience for this company needs serious design help.

46664 Bangle
This subtle and iconic bracelet supports Nelson Mandela’s mission to fight AIDS.

River Bracelet
This bracelet shows a good application of the contrast between polished and oxidized silver as well as nice dynamic linework. Purchases support a small-scale craftswoman from Thailand who shares her personal story on the website.

Jacks and Stars Necklace
Postmodern and delicate, this necklace supports Patricia Jara, a Peruvian craftswoman.

The Barrel Bracelet
A bold design is a good way to go when the purchase represents a way to empower women artisans. This silver cuff bracelet is a perfect for the women who control the room just by entering it.  The Thai artisan who made it hopes that one day Chiang Mai silver arts will become recognized internationally, just like any other designer brand from Italy.