Ambii is a personal money management app that provides a comprehensive breakdown of the users' consolidated financial information. This was a 10 week capstone case study where I was able to flex onto each role of the design process.
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation—anchored in understanding users' needs, rapid prototyping, and generating creative ideas—that will transform the way you develop products, services, processes, and organizations. By using design thinking, you make decisions based on what customers really want instead of relying only on historical data or making risky bets based on instinct instead of evidence.
The process has not been linear but these are the biggest stops in this case study’s road map.
When I started this project, I wanted to focus on acute stress and anxiety in Millennials—with the goal to create a digital solution to help alleviate those stressors as it related to me and many of my peers. After some secondary research, I unsurprisingly discovered that Millennials have more stressors than any other generation before.
My initial assumption was that the cause of a lot of anxiety and stress with Millennials was due to their bleak outlook in their futures and having goals, set by the previous generation’s standards, that were unattainable and unrealistic.
To further identify the problem space, I needed to understand what the common stressors were for this demographic and to discover what changes were needed to alleviate these worries. I eagerly dove into researching stress in other Millennials through more direct and intimate methods: interviewing friends and peers for qualitative results. To cover more bases, I also created a Google Form survey for some quantitative research.
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However, digging deeper with the interviews I conducted over 8 participants, every single person—even those with stable jobs—unpromptedly brought up financial stress at one point or another.
My research showed that Millennials are very attuned to the current economic status and have realistic goals. The struggle they face with financial stress is realized and so are the solutions. However, the steps taken to be financially stable are varied, personal and complicated.
So with that in mind, I researched further and then decided to pivot my project to focus on financial stress.
To help young adults who suffer from financial stress, this project aims to understand what are their struggles are. We also strive to discover what changes are needed to alleviate their financial woes while uplifting their money gains.
Education, organization and confidence of young adults in managing their own finances. Setting realistic goals which result in personal and financial growth.
Though Millennials are more educated than prior generations, they struggle more financially and are paid less.Young adults have more outstanding debt in larger amounts than the generations before.
The education system fails to bring awareness to personal finance and proper budgeting which is key to survive and flourish in the current economy.
The ‘How Might We’ phrasing is a design question. It enables divergent thinking, catalyzes ideation and helps teams generate a range of potential solutions to a given problem. I will look to transform the problem space identified into design opportunities.
How might we help Millennials manage personal finances so that they can feel more confident in their financial future?
Combining all aspects of my research with my themes and insights allowed me to gain a better understanding of the problem space and better evaluate who I'm designing for.
The ability to visualize and understand an experience, allows us to look deeper into the nuances of user behaviour. Using the experience map, I can more clearly see where Vivien's largest pain points are.
Let's take a look at what Vivien is experiencing and find opportunities to make a positive change for her!
I author user stories to better understand her perspective in motivations, pain points and behaviours.
The formula is as follows:
After deliberating over the stories, the core epic that was chosen was to adjust spending in a user’s personal finances.
This core epic covers more of the problem space, by showing a flexible budget that’s already been set up which encourages my persona to keep saving.
Creating a task flow lets us see how our friend Vivien would navigate the app to complete a particular task.
Task: Reallocate car loan funds into new budgets within your finance system.
Referencing my UI inspiration board, I began sketching the layout and interface for my core epic that captured the features and functionality my target user might expect.
You can check out the sketches enlarged and with full annotations here in Figjam.
Low-fidelity prototyping is a simple and quick way to translate high-level design concepts into tangible and testable artifacts.
We don't mean that the product is not visually appealing. Instead, we mean that the prototypes are simple in terms of functionality and interface. The first and most important role of lo-fi prototypes is to check and test functionality rather than the visual appearance of the product.
I conducted two rounds of usability tests to see if my wireframe reflected the task at hand in a comprehensible and intuitive way.
You can read the full session's output here.Summary: Not a new user, been using the app for a few months.Familiar with banking apps but first time keeping up with a budget.
Goal: Congratulations, you’ve recently finished paying off a car loan. Please navigate to the car loan screen to reallocate these funds into new budgets within your finance system.
When exploring visual identity, I wanted to focus on something that was encouraging and happy.
Link to full InVision mood board.I used this “A more than B” list of comparitive adjectives to clarify and narrow down the intended visual identity of my brand.
The naming process was a lot of back and forth debate between myself, peers, friends and family.
I wanted to convey light and fun vibes. Something short and easy to remember.
I took a lot of inspiration from bold, clean, geometric and abstract logomarks.
I had trouble narrowing down the top three choices so I decided to sketch logos and word marks for all of them.
I then took those sketches and digitized the logos and tried different fonts for the word marks.
After more deliberation, Ambii was chosen for it’s short and memorable name. I also chose to stick with the rocket ship imagery for the logomark since we want our finances shooting up!
The logomark was paired with multiple font options to explore which would serve the brand best.
Primary Typeface
Roboto is a geometric sans-serif typeface that is thoughtfully designed for a wide range of devices, sizes and resolution. The application's styling enables webfonts to work without modification in environments where other fonts may appear pixelated.
Logo & Marketing Typeface
VAG Rounded is stylized header sans-serif font. It has an approachable personality and easy going shapes.
The culmination of research, wireframing, testing and branding have bore fruit! I'm proud to present my high fidelity prototype.
view prototype
