FunFinance: Redesigning money management experience

This article will take you through my journey in designing a prototype for the Interaction Design Specialization Capstone project, by University of California, San Diego on Coursera.

How it all started

Project goal was to find a user need and redesign the experience either on how they interacted with time, how to drive personal or social behavior changes, or how to present information tailored to the user needs.

I chose Change design brief and focused on the way people manage their finances, what good habits and bad habits they have, and how could I design a solution that would motivate good behaviors. This of course didn’t come as a magical two minute inspiration, but instead through needfinding.

Needfinding is the art of talking to people and discovering their needs — both those they might explicitly state, and those hidden beneath the surface. — ReDesigning Theater, Stanford University.

It all started with observing and interviewing people to find design opportunities. I was curious to know why it seems that a lot of people struggle to manage their budget every month? Why it is more common to lose track and spend more money than what they have? Why do people tend to frown when taking about their finances?

Once I gained more insights into different behaviors, motivations and frustrations, it was time to brainstorm design ideas.

Ideation

My design point of view was “Managing your money shouldn’t be a stressful task”. Being smart about how someone spends, how they save and invest, should be something they look forward to and not a headache.

Inspiration for design ideas came from different sources. Part of it came form user observations but also from checking existing applications. Some of those were apps that focused on solving the same problem, but may fall short, while others were more of an abstract inspiration which were not necessarily related to the topic, but had components that linked to my design point of view. Here is where gamification comes in.

Gamification is the concept of applying game mechanics and game design techniques to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals. — Gartner Redefines Gamification

Storyboards & Prototypes

Now, nothing is better to get your creativity going than seeing things on paper and play with it. Who says you need a lot of time to build complex prototypes and spend your lifetime savings? In this stage, I created few storyboards outlining user needs and a app paper prototype to address them.

This really helped to visualize what were the different tasks users would need to do and how the design would provide a solution for that. This was the very first version, so of course there were things that were left out. Some of it just because of the “low fidelity” nature of the prototype, while some others were not thought about in the first round.

But of course, it’s all about iteration. The next phase was to run the design through an heuristics evaluation. This was quite helpful to solve some basic problems right away based on industry standards, as well as gaining that “expert” feedback to tweak the design before end user testing.

Now it was time for a higher fidelity prototype. Again, no need of fancy tools here. I did mine using PowerPoint and putting it all together in Marvel.

Some of the key things I wanted to have in my design, were the ability to automate most of the tasks so it wouldn’t be an extra burden for the user, plus display information in a way that the user would feel motivated to create good habits.

The first one was achieved by including configurations for the user to do a sort of “one-time” maintenance and then have it updated automatically every month by synchronizing the financial data with the user’s bank accounts (yeah I know, sounds risky… but the secure programming would be part of the plan).

As for the second one, I added gamification components to drive behavior changes, which were the following: 1) set savings milestones and remind users of how much is left for them to reach their goal, 2) grant points based on good spending and saving habits which will then unlock games, and 3)provide the option to invite friends to use the app and rank them on a leadership board, based on their overall score.

User testing

Once I had a prototype with the main functionalities covered, I carried out end user testing with people close to me at work. This gave me few insights on how they perceived the information vs. myself, how easy it was to navigate by observing them and general feedback they had.

Next iteration was tested via UserTesting website. The goal was to do an A/B testing were I validated whether a change in the buttons names to reach a particular functionality (Magic Savings) would have a significant difference or not. Feedback received and user’s reactions were very positive and I was very glad to see it was a common feeling that the app would motivate them to use it, to save money and stay on budget. This of course feeds into the main goal of the design.

And here it is…

So this is how FunFinance idea came to life. This is just one of many examples out there of how interaction design can greatly help to focus on the right things.

Design is not just what it looks like & feels like. Design is how it works. — Steve Jobs

Here is the FunFinance prototype:

…and here a short video :)