PennyWise
The objective of this project was to create an app that would be useful and beneficial for users. PennyWise is a money management app that offers budgeting tools, tracks expenses, provides financial advice, and helps users save money by identifying potential areas for improvement.
We wanted to create a money management app
The Objective
At a high level, it would be an app that offers budgeting tools, tracks expenses, provides financial advice, and helps users save money by identifying potential areas for improvement.
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We wanted to target college aged/young adults looking to build financial habits early in life
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We felt it was a valuable cause from personal experiences with ourselves and others. When many young adults first start working, it can be difficult to navigate healthy spending habits and proper budgeting. Especially with the lack of personal finance education when you are young.
My Position
UX Designer
UX Researcher
UI Designer
Landing Page Developer
Tools Used
Figma
Trello
Miro
Google Drive
Github
Visual Studio Code
Timeframe
3 weeks
Team Members
Kasey Muncy
Caitlin Shea
Marin Parkinson
Sabrina Dinh (Me)
RESEARCH
After acknowledging the problem, the team had to figure out how to take on the challenge. Each one of us had experience with money-management apps, but we all use different tools. We came to the realization that there were so many tools that can help users manage money.
"So what feature can we offer to make our app different and unique from others?"
Direct & Indirect Competitors
We compared and analyzed a few tools and apps that are competitors to PennyWise. This helped us compare each tool to each other and all of the features that they offered to users.
Direct Competitors
Indirect Competitors
Proto Persona
The next step to the research process was to create a User Persona. Who could the user most likely be and what could the user most likely be like?
User Interviews
We started off our user interview process with a small survey to get an understanding on how experienced users were with money-management apps and saving money. There was a total of 11 users who answered the survey. Inserted below are some responses that we had received.
We conducted 8 in-depth interviews.
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Once we finished our interviews, we came together to transfer our interview notes and put them into an affinity map. After analyzing our affinity map, we created "I" statements to try to comprehend our users' pain points better. We used the "dot voting" system to vote on what we believed to be the best features to include in the app to make the experience for the user better. With the ideas that we had voted on, we then mapped out the impact and complexity of each on a prioritization map.
User Persona
With the information that we have gotten from the survey and interviews, we were able to create our User Persona. Meet Jonathan Alvarado!
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From now on, we will be following Jonathan's journey as she is the representing all of our research!
DEFINITION/IDEATION
Problem Statement & UX Hypothesis
Problem Statement
Jonathan, a busy, outgoing college student needs an easy to use budgeting tool in order to be more in control of his finances and make smart financial decisions.
UX Hypothesis
If an easy to use budgeting tool designed for younger generations was created, the custom reminders and notifications feature would be the most utilized.
Value Proposition
My organization, PennyWise, is developing a new budgeting and finance app to help young people solve the struggle of building a budget realistic for them and sticking to it.
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We’re better because we’re built for your and by age demographic and we understand your struggles.
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We’re believable because we want to get you out there, no matter what is holding you back.
User Scenario
Storyboard
We created a storyboard to display Jonathan's journey when she was faced with an emergency and needed to use the features that I was thinking of designing.
PROTOTYPING
"What's next?"
Now that we had valuable information obtained from the research process and a good understanding of the users' pain points, we were able to start the design process!
User Flow
I sketched out a User Flow to get an understanding of how the flow of the user's journey would be like.
Mid-Fidelity
All team members met on Zoom to collaboratively work on the Mid-Fidelity. We wanted to make sure that we were on the same page in terms of the designs and prototype.
Mood board
After designing our Mid-Fidelity, we all incorporated to the Mood board of the project. This mood board helped us understand the essence and feel of our designs.
Style Guide
We then created a Style Guide that illustrates the type of themes, fonts, button content, and color swatch that we will be using in the High Fidelity.
TESTING
"What now?"
Now that we had a Mid-Fidelity Prototype, the next step is to conduct Usability Test to see if users find the design user friendly and to allow users to give feedback on what they believe will make the app experience better.
Usability Testing
We conducted 7 Usability Tests. Here are some of the responses and feedback that we had received that stuck out to us the most.
"I like the frequency options because you don’t always know how often you’re going to receive notifications"
"Getting to add multiple banks will be so useful if people spend different things with different banks"
Iterations Made
"It would be more useful if users can choose which notifications they get instead of just “high, medium, low”"
"Everything was structured right and led to the right direction. With the date deadline- no need for yes/no. Just have the date dropdown (as a calendar) already there"
We have received valuable feedback from each one of our Usability Tests. Although our users were content with how user-friendly the design was, they did give feedback on how to change certain wordings and different designs. 7 out of 7 users commented on the "Savings Goal" screen. Through our testing we learned that logistically, there was no need for the yes or no button in our savings goal deadline screen.
High-Fidelity
After receiving feedback from our usability tests, we started to work on the High-Fidelity. We took into consideration all the feedback that was given and made changes to where we believed that our users had complications. Click the button down below to view the High-Fidelity!
Coded Landing Page
We learned how to code basic HTML code, use javascript, CSS, and Bootstrap. For this project, we were challenged to code a landing website page. I took on the responsibility to code the landing page. With the feedback and guidance from my team members, we were able to code a simple landing website page for our app/ Please click on the button below to visit our landing page!
CONCLUSION
We really enjoyed working as a group. We all kept each other accountable for each person’s part in the project and had amazing communication. We took on challenges and aided each other if there were any problems. If anyone was ever confused or needed feedback on a part, we were all comfortable helping and providing that feedback.
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Future potential considerations:
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An AI feature that can provide assistance and answers if users wanted more insight on finances
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A rewards system that would reward the user on their saving/budgeting accomplishments
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Thank you for reading and following along (: