budge
budge is a mobile app that helps its users change their spending habits and achieve their financial goals by creating specific and actionable advice tailored to each individual based on their current income and spending habits.
DURATION
Feb 2023 - May 2024 (4 months)
ROLE
Product Designer/UX Researcher
TEAM
3 Designer + 1 Design Lead
Overview
The Problem
Being a college student is hard. They’re thrown into an unfamiliar environment with a newfound sense of independence but are also forced to be responsible for their schoolwork, jobs, and social life. In a survey of around 30,000 college students from over 440 colleges and universities across the country, 47% felt unprepared to manage their money.
The Solution
Students want specific and actionable advice to change their negative spending habits and build their budgeting skills.
At a Glance
1) Supportive Onboarding
Fill in your personal information and connect your bank accounts with the help of Bud the budgeting budgie. Have questions about why this information is required? Click on our Tool Tips and we’ll be happy to explain!
2) Financial Tracking
At the end of the month, budge will let you know about your financial progress. Additionally, you’ll be able to see how much money you’ve spent in the month and on what categories.
3) Personalized budges
budge will create **personalized** recommendations (budges) for users based on their spending habits and onboarding information.
UX Research
Competitive Analysis
Our competitive analysis showed that no products featured tailored recommendations for its users and often lacked a friendly UI or even general recommendations.
User Survey
As part of our research, my team and I conducted a user survey using Qualtrics. We received 54 survey responses:
Questions Our Team Asked
1) How many financial-related apps do you use?
2) What features of these apps do you like?
3) What features of these apps could you go without?
4) What is your biggest problem related to controlling your money?
Findings:
The majority of people have had experience with finance related apps, with 90.6% of survey respondents stating they've used at least 1 finance related app and 32.07% stating they have used over 3 finance related apps
Features Research Participants Liked:
• Easy to read financial statements
• Visual financial tracking
• Phone notifications
Biggest Problem Related to Controlling Money:
• Lack of financial discipline
• Poor organization
• Lack of experience and information
Features Research Participants Disliked
• Over-cluttering of information
• Have to manually enter information
• Too complex to use
Persona Brainstorm
After receiving our user research results, my design team and I brainstormed user personas to better understand our target users’ pain points and inform on our designs. We decided on three of them - International Students, Low-Income Graduate Students, and Students funded by their Parents
User Personas
After brainstorming with my team, we came up with 3 user personas
Design Process
Low-fi Wireframes:
To start the low-fi sketches, I drew out the user onboarding flow in procreate. My aim was to create a sign-on process that was easy to comprehend and streamlined in order to obtain all of the user's information in a clean manner
Mid-fi Wireframes
After reviewing and receiving feedback from users and a professor at USC, we decided to elaborate on our low-fi wireframes and design our mid-fi wireframes for the onboarding user flow as well as the bulk of the app's functions such as app generated budges and budget tracking
High-fi Wireframes
For our high-fi wireframes, users voiced that they wanted the app to be friendlier and for budgeting to be gamified which is why we incorporated tool tips to help users feel confident in sharing information and also introduced Bud the Budgeting Budgie, inspired by the Duolingo Owl, to make the app friendlier. We also introduced a tap-thru summary in order to streamline financial suggestions in a way that is easy to understand and actionable.
Design System
Budge Prototype
Check out the prototype for budge! Aiming to give specific and actionable financial advice tailored to each individual
