In order to understand how people manage their finances so that we could make informed decisions on how to support them, we devised a few research goals:
→ Verifying whether “saving for a major upcoming high-cost purchase” was a valid need
→ Learn what tactics our users currently employ when trying to plan & make a high cost purchase
→ Learn about user's experience, wants, and needs regarding their banking apps

Tools: Google Form questionnaire, one-on-one interviews.
Topics: users’ frequency of “saving for a major purchase”, how they currently save, which banking or budgeting app they use, the functionalities they feel are lacking, functionalities they look forward to.
Participants: 21 people matching our target users (fellow class members, fellow Facebook group members, and acquaintances)

Survey quick takeaways:
→ 46.7% of users surveyed and interviewed use the Chase banking app.
→ 48.1% of users mentioned expenses tracking as a feature they desire and feel is missing.
→ 33.3% of non-users felt that they would be more inclined to use their banking app if features were more intuitive and user friendly.
→ 81% of survey takers were 19-25 years old, with an overall age span participants being 19-41+.
→ We received 57.1% responses from males and 42.9% responses from females.
→ We gained some insight to some common usage trends and pain points.

Using results from the questionnaire, where were able to structure our interviews. As a whole, we conducted 6 in person interviews with more people who matched the demographics of or target users. Interviewees, found through outreach at school and in our neighborhoods, consisted of 4 working adults and 2 college students who received allowances from their guardians. Interviews allowed us to achieve a more detailed understanding of the user's perspective in terms of money management behaviors, saving habits, and current app usability.
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Problem statement: Our research made us realize that we needed to pivot our focus from helping our target users “save for a major purchase” to “manage their spending and build their savings”, as that is a more practical and widespread need. Additionally, users feel that their banking apps are lacking an intuitive user experience and an organized UI for tracking expenses, so we aimed to improve those aspects as well.

In order to draw some inspiration and to see what we could do better, we also performed a competitive audit of several similar existing apps or services which perform tasks similar to what we aimed for.

After compiling feedback and the user personas, we decided to create a user flow based on budgeting for Chase debit app users.

Similar to other budgeting apps, we organized the expenses into categories which could have limits set on them. In the case that someone gets close to or goes over their limit, a notification will be sent to their phone. The sections in gray font are pre-existing Chase features while sections in white font are proposed.
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To begin the user testing for our UI, we created two prototypes from our UI sketches.
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For our user testing interview methodology, we first let the participants freely explore each prototype. Afterwards we provided them with a few tasks to test each UI variations such as reviewing food expenditures/transactions, changing their budget notification settings to 90%, creating a category called “Clothes” and setting its monthly limit to $100, deleting a category, and reordering the order in which the categories are displayed, so that the “Food” category is below the “Fun” category. Lastly, we asked them to explain what they understood from the overview of each UI prototype, and whether or not it showed them all of the information they cared about.
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‍Common pros we identified from interviews:
→ Persons we interviewed enjoyed the overall consistency of design in both prototypes.
→ Most of the functions present were intuitive to use and deemed useful.
→ The options for weekly, monthly, and quarterly were thought to be helpful.
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Common cons we identified from interviews:
→ The “Overview” of prototype A (using the circle), though aesthetically pleasing, is difficult to understand. Intuitively, the used vs unused funds bars from prototype B is better.
→ The icon for reorder and menu being the same on the “Management” tab causes confusion as to what exactly tapping on the icon does in terms of function.
→ The description for the autosave feature in prototype B appears too crammed on the page and is not descriptive enough. But the autosave feature in prototype A is missing entirely and felt to be needed.
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Proposed next steps and improvements for the prototype:
→ Overview: Judging from user feedback the bars in prototype B are more intuitive to understand, but the overall display needs some aesthetic improvements.
→ Reorder: It should appear only inside edit feature. More explicit icons and text for functions should be used.
→ Autosave: Put question mark icon next to it, when clicked it shows a popup with a more thorough description.

Initial Iteration

Final Iteration
Including changes based on additional feedback.

Tutorial for First Time Users
Users will see an introduction of Budget feature and set up their total monthly limit. After clicking “Start Budgeting,” there will be a thorough step-by-step guide, especially friendly for users who have less exposure to apps or technology. By clicking the “x” on the top right, users can exit the guide anytime they wish.

The whole experience from start to finish really opened my eyes to a few big lessons that I will definitely carry with me to my next projects:
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→ Putting the “user” in user centered design.
As designers, we sometimes assume how people may perceive/understand something because it is obvious to us. This project taught me that it’s better to always keep users in the loop for decisions, and- if you’re going to assume- always consult users after anyway to confirm.

→ Though compromise is hard, it could be the key to a group's success.
Though the prototyping process, my group members and I frequently came up with opposing ideas for how certain elements should function or look. Through user testing and discussion, we often discovered that an amalgamation of our ideas was the ideal choice.

→ Sometimes what you set out to do is not what you end up doing.
Very early on in our process, we discovered that our original design prompt didn’t exactly fit the user's needs. Consequently, we devised a new problem statement which more accurately pinpointed what users actually wanted.

→ Though iterating is tedious, sometimes more is better.
Since we were restricted to such a short time frame to construct this project, making multiple alternate iterations of screens (more than the required) wasn’t the most ideal route. However, many of these alternate screens actually replaced many of our original screens in the end, since they explored more innovative and successful element concepts.