Personal budgeting Mobile APP

Competitive Analysis

I researched apps related to finances, budget and habit-building and I end up with 7 apps. Then I filtered the ones related to financial management as they could be the main competitors. At this point and I was looking for their current features, and the overall experience using some of them. Here are some features I found related to the opportunities of the research:

• 2 of the 7 apps sync bank accounts automatically;
• 1 of the 7 reads SMS from the bank and add as a transaction — the person has to copy the message and add in the app;
• 4 of the 7 send notifications;
• 7 of the 7 apps use charts to illustrate some expenses and transactions.

Some insights from competitor analysis:

• A good number of the apps favor app interaction in portrait mode.
• The apps have easily digestible financial reports.
• The apps all had simple and clean design.

Market Positioning

After the initial interviews and personas that I created, I set off to figure out the market position for the product. The goal after talking with everybody from users to stakeholders is the app to be easy to use and convenient.

Survey Questions

The purpose of these questions is to gain insight into key data and see if there is available information that would answer the questions. There was no relevant information around the topics of interest so I went about creating a survey to gather some real-world data.

Survey results

I created a google form and send it out to people in our contact list. The survey was filled by 197 people.

Empathy

I set off to learn about how do people actually spend— especially why do we have so many tools at our disposal and still people are terrible at spendings. 100% of the users are real people, focused on the mindset they shared with me I created two separate user personas based on my assumptions after the interviews.

Accountable as a solution

After identifying the needs, problems and frustration of the possible users, I tried to solve them and introduce the necessary features to meet the users’ needs.

• Features of Accountable
• Cash inflow and cash outflow access
• Financial reports
• Flexible budget creation
• Bank accounts management
• Subscription management
• Funds categorization
• Expected characteristics of accountable
• Easily digestible reports
• Easy to use
• Simple design
• Conventional and less formal tone
• Possibility of access to previous financial reports

Site Map

Early Sketches

We usually start the design process with low fidelity sketches. In this time, we started to test the demo site searching for pain points. After we analysed what users got confused from, we took these insights and made some sketches on paper. Later, we propose UI by Look & Feel pages. When our client chose the preferred one, we started to built up the high fidelity prototype using Sketch. We iterated after every user test and that is how we got our final desktop screens. The last part was to interpret bigger screens into smaller phone screens.

Usability Testing

Being the creep I am, I gave few people phone with the prototype on it and whispered into their ear while looking over their shoulders 3 questions

This below is the script I had prepared for the session.

Hey [name]. thanks for taking the time. I was telling you about the app I am working on, and now would need to test a prototype with you, it shouldn't take more than 15–30 minutes of your time. I’ll ask you to complete just three tasks and that’s all

• You have received $890 in cash instead of in your bank account. You need to add it into your money to be budgeted, how would you do that?
• Let’s say we need that money to be added to category RENT. Let’s add $500 and $90 to electricity. The rest $300 you add to Groceries. How would you do that?
• The last one is very simple. You have overspent on a category called Eating out. How would you move $57 from Rent to Earing out?

Thank you very much! You really helped me a lot! It is important for me to receive feedback early on and to try to validate my assumptions.

Summary

My goal was to validate if Millenials really understood how to operate with their money and plan accordingly. I was excited about this idea so a reality check was much needed.

Outcome:

• All participants managed to add the money to be budgeted.
• All of the participants managed to pass the 3 tasks.
• Around half of the users got a little bit stuck about converting money from one category to another.

Final UI which I did

I tried to focus on features related to solving some of the major desired outcomes found in the initial research. The app should be simple and easy to understand. Also, encouraging them to build financial habits. Here are the highlighted features:

• Link Accounts
• Ease of adding accounts to give you a clear overview right away
• The ease of adding a bank account and credit card is vital for the success of this product. If somehow your bank doesn’t allow to login and gets statements you can always add your finances manually on a later stage.

Main function page

Set Goals

Monthly Contribution

Target Balance

The purpose of this is to achieve goals easier. By setting goals with a monthly contribution you will have an automatic payment to that “bucket” every single month. When you set the payment to Target Balance it’s free, however, you can set deadlines by which date you want to achieve that.

Payment method

If the payment over the limit which set in security setting, system will send approval request to your accountguard, the app will continue payment process if you have approval code, why we add barrier in the process, because we hope user can stop and thinking, then to avoid impulsively-purchasing.

Provide Age of money information to help user understand personal financial health

Main learnings

Know your audience – Paying and giving credit card details makes users suspicious. Even under safe conditions, sometimes a bunch of lock icons (🔒) really helps make them truly believe you. :) Also, copy factors very highly here, which takes us to the next point.

…and how to talk to them (Improve your writing skills) – As mentioned, copywriting makes up an important element of UX. We need to improve not just the visual but the written communication skills too.