Feel confident and assured with your own money.
Role
Student capstone project for BrainStation UX Design Bootcamp
Tools
Figma, InVision
Timeline
12 weeks
Overview
In 2019, Manulife held a survey to see how different age groups manage their money and debt. According to the results, only 2 out of 10 Canadians expressed confidence in their financial situation. With inflation rapidly increasing, young professionals are feeling the financial strain. Furthermore, nearly 38% of Canadians admit to living beyond their means, but struggling to make effective progress on paying their debts.
How might we help young professionals feel more confident, in a way that would improve their financial decisions?
User Research
To deepen my understanding of the problem space, I conducted interviews with several young professionals who presumed to be competent enough to take on more financial responsibility, and has some sort of income. I wanted to uncover broad patterns and themes relating to their experience, problems, behavior, and opinions with their own financial situations. From this, I was able to identify the following key insights:
CONSISTENCY
Regularly keeping expenses balanced across spending categories can help put our money to work more efficiently within dynamic financial situations.
AWARENESS
Even though dealing with our money can feel overwhelming and isolating, being aware of financial risks and opportunities can help us make more informed choices.
FINANCIAL LITERACY
A lot feel intimidated with the complexity of money management because they lacked proper financial education.
User Persona
With the information collected from the primary and secondary research, as well as from the interviews, a persona can be shaped that can help me inform features and functionality, and gain a clear picture of user expectations that relate to my how might we question. Meet 24 year-old Carina, a newly hired marketing consultant who wants to make the most out of her financial opportunities early in her career.
The Solution
From tracking your spending, savings, and budgets, managing your accounts, and financial advice right at your fingertips - plum is a personal financial management app aimed to make dealing with your money a stress-free experience!
To create a design that is as human-centric as possible, I put the users’ convenience and well-being a priority. To standout from existing competition, I wanted to focus on features that would help users be more proactive on their decisions - to prevent getting off track with their goals as much as possible rather than reacting to it after it has happened.
TASK SELECTION
Creating a budget is one of the most effective methods to facilitate financial stability. When creating a budget, it is usually divided into three main categories: your needs, wants, and savings. These categories help us figure out where the areas of overspending are coming from and gives us the awareness to make positive changes in our spending.
With plum, I wanted to propose a feature that can help prevent a user from going over their monthly budget. The idea here is that when you surpass any one of the three budget categories, you can choose to reallocate budget allowance from another category to it. By adjusting these “sub-budgets” within the moment, it can ensure that you would still be within your overall monthly budget.
Wireframes
I used my task flow to sketch out low-fidelity wireframes to gain insight on realistic or ideal solutions for this product. These sketches were then translated into digital wireframes and a low-fidelity prototype.
After 2 rounds of user testing, I was able to iterate on my design based on the feedback I was given. These iterations were also based on improvements regarding the users’ ability to successfully execute certain tasks within the main task flow.
Design Iterations
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Notification display update
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More directive information
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Nav. bar & Onboarding update
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Progress bar & Modal overlays
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Notification icon updated
Final Prototype
After developing the branding for my design, I was able to incorporate some improved UI elements to my high-fidelity prototype.
Marketing Site
I designed a responsive marketing website experience that promotes the plum app.
Desktop Viewport
Mobile Viewport
Visual Guide
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Logo
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App Icon
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Colors
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Typography
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Icons & Images
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Interactive Components
Design Impact 😎💵
“How can I keep users engaged with their own money?”
This was a constant thought throughout my design process. With plum, I wanted to create a fun and welcoming interface to break the barrier of intimidation, while giving the user an all-in-one access to everything about their money. It’s important to me for users to understand that they are not alone when it comes to enduring financial anxiety. I hope that this product would facilitate confidence and assurance in its users, to be more proactive with their financial decisions.
Key Takeaways 🔑🧠
“Trust the process”
It being my first-ever UX project, I did not know where to set any of my expectations. No matter what the adversity I faced, I had to remind myself to keep moving forward, and more importantly, to focus on development rather than results. It’s ironic how this project was based on confidence and assurance with financial decisions, because I definitely found a lot of confidence and assurance with my capabilities as a UX designer!
