Many college students and young adults are overwhelmed by the idea of handling large sums of money, and find traditional personal financing options too intimidating to approach. Traditional financing apps tend to be overwhelming, complicated and not relevant to the saving goals that a college student might have. What's the use of knowing how to save up for a home, when you have no idea where to start with budgeting and saving up for that Charli XCX concert?
To solve this problem, I decided to build a personal financing app that would be aimed at those who are just beginning their personal finance journeys, which was approachable and motivating. This app would target younger audiences and find ways to create finance goals that are both realistic and achievable in their stage of life.
Designed for my Interaction Design Principles class at Northeastern University (FA23). Created under the mentorship of Professor Sofie Hodara.
As a young adult myself who had to learn how to independently manage my finances and learn how to budget, I understand how overwhelming it is to get started with personal financing. Which is why I chose to build an app that would help users work on healthy habits and establish the foundational building blocks of personal financing.
In order to understand the value of financial planning and what it means to different user groups, I collaborated with some classmates and interviewed four different candidates to understand what personal finance meant to different people.
These user interviews helped me understand the ways in which different users manage their finances and the apps they use. I also understood what works and what problems arise with these methods. This was crucial to help me develop an idea that could begin to solve these issues. I also conducted market research to understand what kinds of apps existed and compare the features they offered.
The image below shows an example of one of the four interviews conducted.
After conducting all the user interviews, I looked into the apps that had been mentioned by the candidates, as well as some apps that came up during research. The four apps I narrowed down to analyse further were: the Bank of America Mobile App, Money Manager, Monarch Money and Mint.
I condensed my findings into a user persona that reflected the research I had conducted. This helped me visualise the kind of app I wanted to design, and served as the foundation for my initial wireframe sketches and my storyboard.
I also designed a set of paper prototypes that were used for an initial round of user-testing to observe the way users interacted with my app.
To further expand my own knowledge, I researched the Copilot app as a case study as it was the most well-known applications used for personal financing. While the app had several successful UI elements, I kept a note of which ones didn't work as well.
After getting feedback from user testers and classmates about the low fidelity prototypes, I created high fidelity prototypes on Figma to create a better version of my idea for this project.This hi-fi prototype was also user tested and I implemented these changes into my Figma workflow.
The 3 biggest considerations of my design were:
This project taught me how to conduct in-depth research on a subject I was familiar with, but not an expert it. In order to tackle the task at hand, I had to utilise design research skills and understand the crux of the problem first, before I could ideate solutions for the final app idea. This made me understand the value of conducting research and it deeply impacted my final product. Some of my key learnings were:
I think the app was a successful project in the end. It was very satisfying to struggle and research and work towards representing my ideas, and then creating something that represented my original idea well. I think the best feature of the app was the clear decision making process that was reflected on every screen; the user was clearly directed and pointed to their next step. I was also able to make the app feel fun and friendly.
Some next steps would be:
