Money Snap
What if budget management app can work as easy as taking picture on social media app? Where users can just capture a photo and note their spending as quick as uploading video on Snapchat.
Role
Experience & Interaction Designer
Project Type
Proof of concept, digital product
Development
Rapid prototyping, AngularJS
Collaborators
Kanya Paramita, Willy
Project Timeline
July 10th - September 20th 2015
Award
3rd Place UX Design Competition, Gemastik 8, 2015
Design process for rapid prototyping
I created the design solution based on our research. I did literature research, competitor analysis, and user research such as interview and observation. Design process itself including creating persona, user journey, Information Architecture, wireframe, interface design, and prototype. After I made the design, me and my team developed the product rapidly then before we did the usability testing. The process was agile, there were several iterations until the final product was released.
Some challenges to make a budget management app
From user research, me and my team gathered several insights from users:
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Users are lazy to write down their spending because it is troublesome.
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Users usually record their outcome on Fridays. They do not want to think about their outcome on weekends.
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There are many users that don’t know what budget apps that fits them.
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The main reason users want to write down their outcome is to monitor how they spend their money.
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Users that are likely to monitor their spending is because they have their goals why they want to save the money.
Targeted users include:
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Millennials age 14-34
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Not married yet
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Live in the cities
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Have income less than 10 million rupiahs (USD700)
How might we help users to manage their spending effectively and make them to feel less frustrated about it.
Building empathy through persona
Creating persona did help me to build empathy. It helped me to visualize who was I making the app for. Instead of just assuming a group of people, using persona helped me understand the expectations, concerns and motivations of target users, it’s also possible to design a product that will satisfy users needs and therefore be successful. There are 4 personas from research analysis. But the primary persona which we want to focus on is Anthony (The Emergency).
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The emergency: He only writes down his income if he wants to save the money to buy something.
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The planner: She is used to record all her spendings to manage her outcome.
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The income-minded: She tends to think about how to get more income rather than how to manage her outcome.
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The disorganized: He never cares about his outcome at all.
Below is the example of our primary persona, Anthony. He is a full time-employee who lives in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Creating a design solution for Anthony
Me and my team came up with so many ideas for the app features. But, since our target persona was Anthony, we grouped the features so that it best fit for Anthony. For him, the most essential feature was how to take budget spending notes in the app. But also, since we had to consider the development cost, we were more focus on developing reminder and wish list features.
Since the goal was to make the users felt less frustrated, I had to think a seamless flow through all the user journey. The app had to be very simple and easy to use. I didn't want the user to feel like they were trapped in the app, because thinking about money and expenses could be very intimidating for some people.
Designing interactions to make the app more playful
Managing money and expenses sometimes are intimidating. That way, me and my team thought that how could we make it in a more playful way. We designed a snap-and-save concept for the app. Users could just snap a photo of their spending and input the price right after that. Then the app itself would manage users' expenses. In order to make it more playful, we implemented an infinite swipe, it allows users to swipe to the left or right infinitely to change the pages.
By making this app, I learned that doing the design process really does take a lot of time, but it is very effective to get engaging result for our product. I also noticed that the users, or who are we designing for is really important. Creating Persona is very helpful to design the user experience. With Persona, we can picture who is our user, what will they do using the app, what is their expectation, etc. But to create Persona itself isn’t always easy. We have to carefully do qualitative research, which takes time. After that, find the insights and group them. To validate the design, we also have to match the Persona itself.