FortuneTeller App — Helping You Achieve Your Goals in Life
Although never formally, I always was really into Design. At high school, I went through a techcnical course in Publicity and Marketing. I graduated as an Art Director.
After this, I went to Computer Sciences College, but I never stopped studing and collecting references in arts, design and interfaces. A proof of this is my electives credits at colleges were always focused on User Interface and User Experience.
I decided to take the Interactive Design at Coursera to have a formal background on those areas, because I truly believe that I can incoporate many of this fundamentals on my daily activities (I work as a consultant, spending my days trying to find my clients truly wishes and needs).
I couldn`t be more satisfied. I have learned a truly consistend set of tools to dive into the mind of the users, understand them and create products that could help them live better.
For the capstone project for the Interactive Design, I went on a journey to understand why people have trouble managing their money.
I found out that:
a) Most apps related to finances management are too boring or too complicated to use. People stop using them after a couple days;
b) People spend A LOT of time managing their finances;
c) A lot of people do not manage their finances;
d) And the most interesting fact: people don`t care if they have a high or low income. They get upset when they want to do something but don`t have enough money.
So, I had this idea… what if people could better manage their money to reach their goals easily?
This was the core concept for the FortuneTeller app: an app that shows you how much your expenditures are hurting or slowing you down towards your goals (and goals can be anything, a car, a trip, an expensive dinner…).
So here are the steps I took to develop the FortuneTeller app (for my friends from Coursera, although I have followed all the assignments, I will present my development workflow a bit differently on the steps above):
- Low Fidelity Design: After I came up with these ideas, I started scratching all the possibilities into the paper. I was trying to figure the best way to show goals and money.
To help me in this task, I did some research on apps that have a similar purpose to the FortuneTeller or that interface please me.
2. Prototype Wireframe: With enough UI references and with a draft on the paper, I started creating the Wireframe. With this, I could have a better sense of the space I was using on the app and the user’s activity flow.
3. Prototype Creation and Design: With the planning of the space necessary done, I could finally start design the prototype itself. It was not as easy as I had imagine. Choosing fonts, colors and icons are indeed a demanding task!!
4. User Testing: When the prototype was built, I presented it to some friends and to users (using a very interesting online platform). This step was truly wonderful, because I could see how users were having a very different idea from mine. They showed me aspects of my own prototype that I could never figure out. If I could, I would certainly spend more time on this step.
For example: on the early versions of the prototype, there information about how much money user had was present on the main screen. This information was confusing users, making them believe that the app was only to control their finances — since this is a very “strong” information, I decided to move to a separated menu. Leaving the goal information (the core benefit of the FortuneTeller) alone.
5. Fine Tuning and Show Casing; The grand finale. When the world would finally meet the wonders of FortuneTeller app.
I really intend to develop FortuneTeller even more, so one day it could be on app stores around the world!
