Let’s talk money
A UX/UI journey to help users save more
Design challenge: Build a FinTech application that empowers users to easily compare different savings accounts and track their savings progress
Scope: User research, Lo-fi to Hi-fi wire-framing and prototyping
Context: 10-day project with Silvana as part of my Ironhack bootcamp
Prosperity Finance
Who are they?
Prosperity Finance is a leading financial services organization dedicated to empowering individuals through consultancy services to achieve financial prosperity.
As a forward-thinking company, Prosperity Finance recognizes the growing importance of digital solutions in the financial industry. They currently only offer in-person services across multiple fields such as insurance, investments, pensions and mortgages.
What were they trying to solve for?
Prosperity Finance is excited to leverage technology to promote financial well-being and empower its customers to make informed financial decisions. To kickstart this initiative, the organization has identified a pressing challenge in the industry:
- financial literacy
- goal-oriented financial planning
Many individuals struggle with understanding their financial situation, setting achievable financial goals, and adhering to a financial plan.
Prosperity Finance seeks to address these challenges through digital innovation, providing users with user-friendly apps that demystify personal finance and guide them towards financial prosperity.
Understanding the user
The first thing I did before getting deep into the brief was to wrap my head around the topic and truly get into the shoes of the users —such as trying to understand the motivations behind going to a financial advisor, understanding any gaps that existed in the current consulting system or any other specific groups of people that needed more support than others, among other such doubts.
The key insights and implications that came out after three days of extensive secondary research were:
Building off of the above insights, we decided to scope our project to solely focus on providing a digital solution and leverage savings investments to achieve financial prosperity.
We also used the above insights to shape our primary user interview questions and survey — in order to better understand their saving behavior, discipline, tools usage, and general approach to saving money.
What really stood out to me from the research were how motivated young individuals (25–35yrs) were to save in some shape or form. Most did so ‘passively’ by reducing their expenses and allowing their disposable income to gradually increase in their bank account.
While, others did so more ‘actively’ by depositing part of their disposable income into dedicated savings accounts where they were able to earn interest for example.
Scoping out the problem
We settled on using the ‘active’ saver archetype based on how prominent their presence felt across all our research: 3/5 interviewees and 27/32 survey respondents.
What was interesting about this type of user was that they were most confident in their ability to manage expenses on their own— either via their own tools such as excel sheets or via other 3P tracking apps like Mint. But, where they felt least confident was in their ability to find time to manage all of this.
Sewing both these together, it felt clear our mission was to craft a solution that helped young active savers quickly track all their savings because they didn’t have the time to do so themselves.
Solution #1: Tracker
Given that the brief by Prosperity Finance was to create a user-friendly app guiding users towards financial prosperity, we already knew the solution was going to be some type of mobile app.
An app that took ownership of tracking all the different savings accounts and investments in real-time seemed like the most appropriate and direct solution to help alleviate the user’s issue of not ‘finding time’ to manage his accounts.
After brainstorming a few features for this app, Silvana and I decided to use the MoSCoW matrix to help prioritize which ones we wanted to spend our time and resources on. The 3 main features we eventually adopted were:
- Data visualization: allowing users to quickly interpret and digest information without little intervention needed from their side — besides when editing the information.
- Color coded alerts: providing users with quick visual prompts on time sensitive things like when their next deposit is due or how many days remain to reach their savings goal.
- Reminders: giving users the option to set alarms or reminders on the app. The alarm would be in the form of an event invite on their phone calendar and the notification would be an app alert seen directly on their phone notification center.
Back to the drawing board
The steps thus far may have seemed rather intuitive and smooth, but things were not all sunshine and rainbows.
On talking to the client one week in, they felt like the tracker alone would not be enough to add value to the user and that they would prefer if we could add another defining feature to further help differentiate the company from the market.
Although a valid ask, we had to remain cognizant of the short timeline we were working towards. This automatically removed any chances of doing another round of time-consuming primary research. The next best option that I recommended was to look into the existing user pain points that we had already gathered.
Out of all the pain points, the one Silvana and I unanimously voted on was the one where users needed more help comparing and understanding the different saving options that are available in the market — personalized to their current situation and needs.
Solution #2: Compare
We took a different approach to define which features to include for this solution. I first started by doing a heuristics evaluation on all the key players within the savings comparison market, followed by a sitemap analysis.
This helped me quickly get to the conclusion of which features were foundational (based on how often they were repeated across all websites), which ones were “nice to have” and which ones needed “fixing”.
Based on my analysis done predominantly on Money SuperMarket, Compare the Market and Go Compare, the 2 main features I decided to incorporate were:
- Educational landing page: to give users the opportunity to learn more about the topic such as the different types of savings accounts or the documents needed before opening an account, so users feel well-equipped before beginning their savings journey.
- Information buttons: to equip the user with more educative tools to empower and reassure them — irrespective of their level of familiarity with the topic of savings. I also tried to pay extra attention to restrict the usage of too many complex jargons to ensure full accessibility for our young saver.
- Personalized results: using a step-by-step filtering system. Through this system, the app is able to give the user a more customized view of which savings options are best for them based solely on their personal needs and situation — whilst also leveraging data to provide the most suitable result for the user.
The intention with the personalization screens were to create a more fun and welcoming yet productive experience for the user without making it too overwhelming. I did so by incorporating more illustrations, selectors, icons and white space — giving the user all the ‘space’ needed to complete their task without being too overbearing.
Next steps & Key learnings
Finally after multiple coffee, snacks and hours on Figma, our sprint came to jolting stop with the presentation of our initial designs to the jury. It’s not the end for Penny Wise though — my plan is to continue working on the educational landing page, animations for the tracker and revamp some of the colors used.
Coming out of this intense yet very insightful project, if there’s only one thing I will be taking away from this project, it’s to always, ALWAYS keep the stakeholder in the loop at all points of the design thinking process. That way questions on what’s expected from the brief and/or any changes along the way can answered quickly without having to wait until the last moment.
