We realized that our target users don’t track their spending or budget properly because they don’t see the benefits of financial planning. This was the gap we had to target in our solution. Students also didn’t find tracking their finances to be convenient as many currently try to use tools like Excel for this. We felt that an app would be the best solution for convenience.

We also asked why users would go to Excel to track their spending. The answer we got gave us the idea to show graphs for spending habits, because individuals have indicated that Excel has a system for graph generation where people can see trends for their spending habits. That is also the benefit to financial planning that others currently don’t see.

Here is our first attempt at designing this application. We started simple and mapped out a straightforward user journey with the wireframes for simple day-to-day recordings of transactions. Then, we included graphs and tracking bars to show progress. The goal of this application is to indicate to a user their spending trends and allow them to adjust their budget for certain categories based on their financial goals. We wanted to target the core of financial planning, which is planning for a sustainable future and showing a user what they need to buy vs. what they want to buy. We took inspiration from other applications in the industry as well, such as what makes Mint an effective budgeting tool.

To understand whether our user journey made sense, we asked a couple of students to test out the wireframes we made. The biggest pieces of feedback we received was that certain CTAs were unclear. For example, we had included 2 buttons that allowed a user to “Add a Transaction” - this was confusing to the users. We built upon this feedback to create more intuitive designs afterwards.