Float

Water.org is a world leader in providing families across the globe with clean water and sanitation services. They do this through small, affordable loans and a lot of financial innovations. Seeing trends in ESG investing and a rising demand for transparency, they hired IDEO.org in 2018 to find a new innovation with US consumers.

The team took a deep dive into Americans' feelings and habits around money, across the country and economic spectrum. Broadly speaking we found that people's donation patterns were relatively set and investments came with certain expectations. When it came to savings accounts, though, there was a wide swath of people that mostly cared that they had a cushion and weren't focused on a return from that account. At the time the average interest rate in the U.S. for a savings account earned just 90 cents a year for each $1k saved. Water.org could provide clean water for 10 people for the same amount of money.

Designing for trust and delight

We built a social-impact savings account. The user's money stayed the user's money — withdrawable at any time – it was not a donation. While it was parked, it funded loans in the WaterCredit portfolio. The question was whether users would trust real dollars to Water.org and choose to put them in Float instead of another option. While I didn't join the initial research, I was the project lead on taking Float from a raw concept, through developing this trust, and eventually to a working pilot app with real users and money.

The first step in trust building was technical. We built the app on real FDIC insured accounts you could fund with ACH or credit cards. This included rigorous KYC and legal requirements. We also really prioritized security and reliability, knowing any bug could undermine confidence enough for users to leave. Then we took on the challenge of delivering joy and meaning:

Social math

We went through dozens of ideas for conveying the idea that your money was working for good. Eventually we found that users would trade interest if we could replace it with something else that felt tangible. So we worked with Water.org on an equation that would let users see exactly what their balance had achieved around the world, in terms of gallons of drinking water, days a household has reliable water, hours of a girl's day not spent walking to a well and more.

Milestones

One interesting finding from the research was the delight people felt when they remembered they had money sitting in their Venmo. We wanted to capture that sense of delight and we landed on a form of gamification that introduced milestones, points in time where your money translated to real achievements. This gave us a powerful moment to send a notification and let the user know what their money had accomplished. You could tap into these milestones to get a real story of a person or family who had benefited from a Water.org loan (of the kind your savings supported, but we couldn't guarantee the exact recipient).

Brand strategy and naming

To be clear, we had a couple very talented brand designers join the team for key moments and they get the lion's share of credit for where Float landed. But it was a journey to get here and I'm proud of my role in supporting the team towards one of the more resonant and less generic brand languages around.

To evoke trust and joy the product had to read as a serious financial institution but it had to have heart. We went through many iterations. I led many a partner workshop, oversaw a professional naming and trademarking process, was there in every crit, and ensured the team had the resources to do great work. I also leaned in with the principles and tone guideline that help a brand make good on its promise.

In the end we delivered a very robust design – types, colors, photography, components – all the building blocks and beyond for software, marketing, physical cards and more.

In March of 2020 our users, via Apple's TestFlight, had over $20,000 saved and were giving us promising feedback. Alas, covid caused many issues in global water delivery, halted further work and the project has not been restarted.