Spendwise

I was tasked with the responsibility of designing an experience for professionals looking to improve their finances through financial education and management. This project aimed to design an intuitive mobile application that educates and develops young professionals financial education through personalisation.

As this was a conceptual project, I decided not to invest in user interviews initially. Instead I focused on secondary research methods such as surveys from sources such as the Pew Research Center to save time. However, this was still not strong base for users on this platform as I would later learn. The survey results I obtained from Pew Research formed the basis for my user personas, guiding the user flow and shaping the screens for my initial wireframes.

After creating my lo-fi wireframes, I realised I still needed to know more about my users beyond what my desk research provided. Even though my initial user research was not ideal, I turned my focus to close friends who matched the app's target audience for user testing. I did this even though I knew this introduced potential social desirability bias.

Despite this, it transformed the project from a vain activity to an engaging one, providing real data and impactful design findings which allowed me to resonate with the target audience for this app.

The project was extended from 2 months to 3 months after usability testing revealed that the app content wasn’t beginner-friendly, the users found some of the finance jargon to be confusing. I also found that some user flows did not align with the mental model of the users I tested with.

After this round of research, I finalised my design in Figma and incorporated usability findings for better interactions. I also made accessibility improvements, like larger touchpoints to reduce cognitive load. I simplified finance jargon for easier comprehension & this allowed users to navigate through the platform more effectively.

Ultimately, the app fell short of its initial goals due to insufficient time to test the educational content's effectiveness.

However, I successfully measured the usefulness of the onboarding flow, users in particular were pleased with how simple the onboarding flow questions was and in their own words they said: "I like how easy it is to get through the app, it's straight to the point. I don't think anymore questions were needed."

I learned the impact of copywriting on the user flow. The copywriting affected navigation in some areas of the app, so I will be more intentional of how I title headlines and call to actions.

In future projects, hope to place a stronger priority with organising my research to deliver stronger analysis with real user data, to produce better findings and insights to make stronger connections with my users.