Project Vision

Budget buddy is a budgeting app for people that wants to save and also achieve goals with friends and family. For this project I followed a goal-focused design method which revolved around making an app which is easy to use and can be used by people from a wide range of ages. It must have a tangible way of seeing how their progress is going since not everyone has financial literacy and other budget apps don’t account for group goals.

Challenges

1) Easy access to the app

2) Clear budgeting and group saving goals

3) Create a cohesive interface that anyone can understand

4) Easy to understand UI that focus on the user needs

Starting Point

As stated in this project vision, I took a goal-focused method which turned out to be really effective in the design effort. The qualitative research method was used as it was considered better for the usability of the app. There was competitive analysis, literature reading, personas hypothesis construction and research reviews. I started by asking myself some initials key questions.

“What is the app and who is it for?”

“What are users more interested about in a budgeting app?”

“How many goals do users plan at once?”

“What are our competitors doing right and wrong?”

“How many users usually participate in a project?”

“How is the app helping their users?”

Meet our users

Primary

Age: 33

Ocupation: Barista

Steven is a barista from the city that loves to make trips with his girlfriend and their dogs. He doesn’t earn much so he has to balance his expenses with what he wants to save. He’s not so good with money and sometimes he over-expends on little things. BudgetBuddy allows him to make goals ahead to time and make better use of his money

Secondary

Age: 16

Ocupation: Student

Samantha is a school student that loves making plans with her friends. She works a part-time job on weekends and get some money from her parents from time to time. She is very responsible and good with her money but likes having clear goals of what she wants to achieve.

Terciary

Age: 67

Ocupation: Retired

Jhon is a retired man who isn’t very well versed in technology. He loves his family dearly and they always take vacations with them since for him, family comes first. Jhon and his family like to have a way of planning vacations ahead and knowing how much they can spend each year

Competitive analisis

I Looked at different budgeting apps, and even when none were really in the “group budget” market, they still had the same finish line which is having a budget and saving money. Still Budget buddy has an opportunity to capitalize the “group budget” market and make a name for itself with that category.

The majority of apps had the same functionality and were really similar but still there were some key points in which I could differentiate, these being:

paid vs unpaid
Too many icons vs few icons
Serious tone vs friendlier tone
Lone user vs group users

Creating the journey

I created a user flow showing how the app should function when budgeting or working towards a goal. This helped me to understand the different ways a user can navigate and interact with the app, allowing to create a better design in the end. I decided for a simple yet effective flow that’s fast to the point.

Wireframe

Challenges resolution

With what I was able to research and learn, the importance of a straightforward app was a must, designing it with the users in mind I opted for a sequential design with easy-to-see colors and buttons that would make the budgeting and goals easier to reach

Making it direct to budget was also something that was important to me so that people could really know what they are spending each month and how much they can save. My solution was having everything you need in just one screen, select what spending you want to add, add the number and done.

To make a cohesive app that’s easy to understand, I made sure all the fonts, colors, buttons, spacing and everything else was consistent across the app making it easier to understand what everything means in each screen of the app and users didn’t need to re-learn icons or call to action buttons.

Design system

Combining clear colors and actionable buttons I made a design system that would work throughout the app. The choices were made with two things in mind, a diverse type of users from children to seniors and usability for ease of access. The idea of using loud colors makes it so it is more engaging as well and making it less boring for younger people to use. The login screen is the most colorful since it’s the only place where it made sense to try and engage with users from the get go, making the rest of the app less colorful but clear to use.

Takeaways

As someone who likes to save money and be responsible but often can’t. BudgetBuddy is an idea that’s close to home. I wanted to share the idea of being able to save whilst aiming for goals that sometimes don’t feel possible. Working with a Goal-focused design process was really helpful and I can see it working again in near-future projects I create. Creating personas and scenarios while designing for them it’s a really good way of making sure you’re designing FOR the people and not just making something you deem good, and that is something that I was doing before this without really thinking about the user.

I learned the hard way that if you don’t design with the user’s needs in mind, then you are not really doing a good design and in the end it will probably fail.

Budget Buddy

Make your group goals a reality