Penny Wise App
Save the smart way!
Penny Wise is a high-level, money management app that offers budgeting tools, tracks expenses, provides financial advice, and helps users save money by identifying potential areas for improvement.
MY ROLE
Caitlin Shea - UX Designer
Sabrina Dinh - UX & Front-End Designer
Marin Parkinson - UX Designer
Kasey Muncy - UX Designer
UI/UX Bootcamp Group Project
This was the final group project of our UI/UX Bootcamp and a wonderful experience because everyone in this group worked so well together. We found common ground with each other at the start of the project and this made it easy to have healthy communication and open dialogue when it came to ideas and feedback. I believe we all grew to genuinely enjoy working together and that helped us create an amazing product.
Our ultimate goal for this idea would be an app that offers budgeting tools, tracks expenses, provides financial advice, and helps users save money by identifying potential areas for improvement. We specifically wanted college aged/young adults to be our target audience because we each knew from personal experience how hard it is to build financial habits early in life. ​
Take a Look at Our Presentation!
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Tools Used: Miro, Figma, FigJam, Google Suite, Slack, InVision, & Procreate
USER RESEARCH
Research Plan & Findings
When we started this project, our first steps were to create a proto-persona and preform a competitor analysis. We divided up these task so that we all worked on the proto-persona and then we each had a direct or indirect competitor to analyze.
For direct competitors we looked at Mint and Buddy, and for indirect competitors we chose Excel and The Points Guy. Our conclusion with Mint was that it had a lot to offer in reaching financial goals, but they had to much going on, didn't have anything to assist in building good habits, and they struggled with some usability issues. Conversely, Buddy was much more personable and would assist in building good habits but it didn't have as much to offer in terms of financial goals. Excel was definitely more indirect, because while it can be used to budget and save for financial goals, it is all up to the user to decide how to do so and can become confusing with the amount of formulas and functions that Users need to utilize the software correctly. The Points Guy was helpful to observe in terms of it's user interface and the usability of the app but it didn't give much in the way of financial planning.
We took all this information, as well as information from our User Interviews and our Survey, when moving forward into the definition and ideation stage.
Above: Proto Persona
Ideation
Creating a Journey
In this phase of the project our main focus was defining what we wanted our app to be and it's features, as well as defining our User Persona and how best to target that demographic. Marin and Kasey worked together to create our User Persona, Jonathan Alvarado, while Sabrina worked on our Value Proposition and Problem statement, and I worked on our User Scenario and Storyboards. We all worked together in brainstorming ideas and establishing what features of the app we would be focusing on.
Storyboards by Caitlin Shea
Prototyping
Prototypes & Testing
After we finalized our ideas in the ideation stage, we moved on to prototyping. Sabrina created a User Flow following the basis of our User Scenario while Marin and Kasey worked on the Mid-Fidelity prototype. It was my job to create a mood board as well as a Style Guide and Style Tile to prepare for our Hi-Fidelity prototype. I chose a color palette mainly consisting of greens and pink with accents of grey-blues because we wanted to to be visually associated with money and we decided that our mascot would be a piggy bank. I chose an attention grabbing but smooth and friendly font for our header typography because we wanted something to catch the attention of younger consumers while also making them feel welcomed and invited to use our app. This is also the stage where we created the name for our app, Penny Wise - yes, like the scary clown because we thought it would be funny and engaging for our Gen Z demographic.
Style Tile by Caitlin Shea
Hi-Fidelity & Coding
Hi-Fi, Testing & Coding
In the final stage of this project, Our group focused on creating a performing Usability Tests on our Mid-Fi prototype, creating our Hi-Fidelity prototype, and coding a basic page advertising the Penny Wise app. Kasey preformed our Mid-Fi testing, while Marin and I worked together to update our prototype to a Hi-Fidelity format using the style guide I created and feedback from usability testing as we received it. All four of us then worked together on a second iteration of the Hi-Fi prototype, and Sabrina coded a basic desktop page advertising the Penny Wise App.
Overall, we worked very well together as a group. We all agreed that this was one of the best groups we had been in throughout the course of our UX Bootcamp experience and we believed that it was because of our communication with one another. We certainly had a natural working chemistry together but we were also very good at communicating thoughts and ideas without stepping on each others toes, while still giving constructive feedback and being open to changes. This made creating the Penny Wise app a very enjoyable experience and gave me an ideal environment that I seek to find in my own workplace.
