Input Manual Transaction Flow for a Financial Advisor App
An app that helps organize a user’s budget in a way a user could save some money for a desired vacation or home purchase.
* as I signed the NDA, I can’t mention the name of the app and some sensitive information related to the project
Team
3 UX/UI Designers
1 Project Supervisor
Duration
4 weeks
Role
UX/UI Designer
Time
Summer 2023
Problem
A company had a lack of clarity on how a manual input transaction should look like.
Solution
I started with interviews, persona, and user flow in order to understand what to include in the manual input transaction flow and low-fidelity as well as in high-fidelity screens. And finally, finalized the project by creating a prototype.
Competitive Landscape
There are a couple of really good competitors to the financial advisor app I was working on. Cleo, Expensify, and MintZip were one of them. So, I had a chance to peep at their input manual transactions flow and adapt it to the requirements of the input manual transactions I was working on.
Interview/Persona/Empathy Map
As there were already four personas carefully developed, I decided to choose one of them and edit some additional information by conducting a coffee chat with a person who was similar to the persona I wanted to work on.
Persona
Empathy Map
Some ideas I came up with while having a coffee chat with my interviewee
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An additional contribution to the principle of one’s student loan. Based on your income and spendings each month the app will recommend the amount to be put against the principle of a student loan. Once confirmed, the app will automatically deposit into the financial institution. It will also calculate the long-term impact of savings. Oftentimes one doesn’t realize how much impact a couple of extra dollars off the interest can make on the total interest paid.
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The app will calculate your next month's balance, and then if negative, it will connect the user with good offers on loans to cover up for the overspending. At the same time, it will suggest optimizing some areas to avoid taking extra borrowing.
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The app analyzes items you buy when grocery shopping by checking all the bills you upload and suggests some stores where a user could buy the same items but cheaper. This opens an opportunity for the app to collaborate with various grocery chains, a win-win.
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The app provides a user a list of opportunities to earn (with no experience needed) lIke: If you take a survey, you will earn $50. A user clicks on a listing, goes through a survey, and earns $50 without exiting the app. The app will then deposit into the bank account and update analytics based on this new income.
To get more clarity on how my user flow would look, I decided to create rough low-fidelity screens based on manual input transactions screens of competitors
While working on the User Flowchart I decided to include a scan-a-receipt, a manual input transaction, and a recurring transaction flows
As with the help of the User Flowchart, I got a better understanding of what needed to be included in my input transactions, I started to work on Rough Low Fidelity Screens
I also came up with every icon for every category and subcategory so that every icon fitted a meaning of it.
After finishing with Low-Fidelity screens, I started working on my High-Fidelity screens which I also prototyped
The last step was to make a Bar Chart by using the notes from my coffee chat with a person who I based my persona on and the categories I’ve created
By creating the Bar Chart, I wanted to understand how my persona would interact with an app and which categories she would use the most.
Takeaways
Finances is quite a new industry for me, so oftentimes I had to research some interactions or elements that I was not familiar with. However, it was fun!
Additionally, with this project, I was working in a team with two other UX/UI designers which was new to me. I also was a leader of my group which was kinda challenging as well. I learned a lot about finding compromises and proper time management for the whole team, as well as about checking if everyone was up to date in case of the steps we had to go through and deadlines.
Overall, I can’t say that after a month of working on the financial advisor app, I know everything about the financial industry, but I’m familiar with every existing competitor and all the interactions related to manual input transactions! 🙂