Making savings could be a tedious process with people facing multiple issues such as overspending, the need to keep track of budget and irregular income. I have designed an application that helps users make savings intuitively and consistently, so every opportunity to save is used with ease.
In the design process I interviewed and observed people taking actions related to their money savings to understand which solutions are being used now, the possible breakdowns of those solutions, what other approaches exist to solve the same or similar user tasks and why they are not chosen by those people.
I’ve had several ideas including an application that tracks user’s location and stops them from making impulse purchases by alarming them when they are at a mall or another location they tend to spend money at. The solution I chose for the application if inspired by “Goals” functionality of Intuit’s Mint which is something that helped me with savings in the past so I knew it’d be useful though I also noticed where it lacks functionality and decided to add it to my application to extend and enhance usability and user experience.
The prototyping involved building a paper prototype and testing it with an unfamiliar user, making adjustments and building an interactive prototype. That prototype was also tested and adjusted further. At the last step I ran an A/B test of the post-test adjustments against the initial prototype and included the features that showed statistically significantly better metrics in the final prototype.
Over time the idea of helping people make savings evolved into a design of an app with multiple features with an interface getting friendlier with each step of the design process. The application links your checking and savings account to saving goals, tracks how far you are from reaching a goal and lets you transfer money between account instantly as well as set up recurring transfers and reminders. Now you don’t have to log into your bank accounts to do all of it and the interface for setting up and tracking saving goals is simple and intuitive.
Please comment whether you’d use an application like it!