SUMMARY
SAVE is an innovative mobile app that empowers users to achieve their financial goals through an intuitive, personalized budget management system.
Team
1 UX Designer (me), 1 Design Mentor
Contribution
UX . Research . Visual
Time Period
January 2023 - May 2023 (5 months)
Project Objective
Design GOALS
Develop a tool that helps users quickly understand, track, and control their financial status through clear spending insights, streamlined budgeting management, and actionable saving strategies.
PROBLEMS
People struggle to manage their budgets effectively. The solutions available often lack essential features or are not user-friendly, leading to frustration and ineffective financial management.
Research Process
DISCOVERY
User interview​
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I conducted 6 user interviews to identify common challenges in budget management and understand their needs for potential solutions.
Users can’t find a budgeting tool that adapts to their unique spending goals.
Tracking expenses is time-consuming, users want it be more intuitive.
User painpoints​
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It’s hard to find deals that are relevant to their spending habits.
Competitive Analysis​
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I researched existing solutions to identify their strengths and weaknesses, which informed how I can deliver the top-performing solution for my users.
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Pros:
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Real-time expense tracking
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Set customizable budgets
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Spending & Budget comparison
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Provide discount & coupon info
Cons:
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Unclear data visualization
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Vague spending categorization
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Unreliable finance advice
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Expense tracking can't sync with bank transactions
Design Solutions
Define
Brainstorm potential solutions and evaluate it by Value and Effort Matrix
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After evaluating competitors' products, I collaborated with my design mentor to brainstorm 14 potential product features. I used a value-effort matrix to evaluate each of them.
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Final Solution
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After evaluating the value and effort of each solution, we identified the three most valuable to users while requiring the least effort to implement.​
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My final solution is a mobile application featuring:​​
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Spending Insights Dashboard (Expense Tracking)
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Budget-to-Goal Planner (Set Customized budgets)
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Personalized Deal Recommendation (Find deals based on users' spending habits)
Solution Excution
PREPARE
Get early feedback before dive in to hi-fi prototype
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Construct the solutions narrative using user flow and wireframes. This helped communicate feature priority with my design mentor early in the project.​
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Feature Exploration
An interactive spending insights dashboard
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This dashboard utilizes a bar chart to display users' monthly spending. It can be filtered by time and bank account. I also added a donut chart to categorize users' spending and color-code each category.
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A customizable Budget-to-Goal Planner
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Users can set up various budget goals tailored to their needs. An informative progress bar visually displays available budgets versus money spent, enabling users to make informed spending decisions and avoid overspending.
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Tailored Deal Recommendation
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Users can explore a range of deals tailored to their spending habits. By clicking on a provided link, users can visit the relevant deals website. Regularly updating these deals not only ensures relevance but also encourages users to return to the app more frequently.​
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Test & Iteration
iteration 1
Streamlined Spending Insights & Faster Decision-Making
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Made time-based analysis intuitive and flexible by adding Month / Quarter / Year controls and clear date navigation, so users immediately understand the data scope and can explore trends without friction.​
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Reduced cognitive load in the spending overview by simplifying the dashboard hierarchy and removing competing secondary lines, enabling quicker “how am I doing?” readouts.
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Made category insights actually comparable by consolidating long-tail slices into an “Others” bucket and limiting chart colors, helping users answer “where is my money going?” with fewer eye movements and less interpretation effort.​
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iteration 2
Automated budget computation
Add a new feature, "Auto-budget". It can automatically help users calculate their monthly budget. The budgets will change with fluctuations in users’ monthly income, bills, and transfers. Monthly Budgets = Monthly Income - (Monthly bills + Monthly transfer).
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Faster Discovery & Clearer Browsing
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Increase deal discoverability and reduce distraction by replacing oversized swipeable hero cards with a compact insight banner.
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​Improve navigation speed and cross-category exploration by adding an always-visible category filter grid (Shopping, Dining, Travel, etc.), reducing reliance on horizontal swipes and supporting direct, intent-driven browsing.
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Clarify hierarchy and user flow by restructuring the page into a consistent filter → search → browse pattern and demoting “See Details” to a secondary action, keeping attention on scanning deals while preserving drill-down when needed.
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iteration 3
Final Outcome
Users reported that the intuitive spending analysis dashboard gave them a better understanding of their spending habits, and they appreciated the ability to set personalized budget goals and find relevant deals to save money on their purchases. Overall, the feedback from the final round of testing indicated that SAVE effectively addressed users' needs of budgets management.
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IMPACT
85%
Task Completion Rate
9.0
Satisfaction Rate
95%
Will recommend this App to others
REFLECTION
Designing for behavior change, not just “tracking.”​​
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A budgeting app isn’t successful when users see their spending. It’s successful when they can act on it. SAVE pushed me to design beyond dashboards into decision support: clear deltas (“you spent more”), visible category drivers, and a path to the next step. I learned that the best financial UX reduces friction at the exact moment motivation is highest, then gets out of the way.
Simplifying the dashboard is a feature, not a compromise.​​
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Early iterations tried to show everything at once, which made the experience harder to understand than the spending itself. Iteration forced a discipline shift: one primary story per screen, fewer competing components, and progressive disclosure for depth. The takeaway I’ll carry forward is that strong financial UX isn’t “more data”, it’s less interpretation work.
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