Floney - A Personal Financial Assistant

Personal Finance Mobile App

This design is perfectly demonstrates how simplicity and complexity live together in harmony to deliver value to the users.

The Challenge

Use the power of artificial intelligence to design a tool that gives users helpful insights about their financial situation based on their expenditure history.

The Outcome

A mobile application designed to inculcate a sense of financial wellbeing in the users through the continuous logging of money they spent and occasional revision of expenditure patterns which promote change in spending habits to reach and maintain the healthy financial condition.

It’s the second week of December and the new year are right around the corner. Sitting in your home office, in your mind you are already planning a lavish holiday trip to Australia to escape the cold. Suddenly, your smartphone rings a notification. It’s about the provisional year end summary of your expenses last year from Floney.

You tap that notification to see the details which reveal that you’ve already spent twice as much money on vacations this year as compared to the previous year. Consequently, the share of the savings to buy your own house has gone down. That’s not a good sign.

You discard the thought of that possibly very expensive international trip and instead choose to spend the time camping and hiking in the Joshua Tree National Park and exploring the southern California.

The preparations start for the trip. As soon as you’ve booked a campsite from your computer, just as usual you immediately log that expense in the app. While logging that expense, as soon as you finish entering name of the expense, the app automatically chooses the most relevant category based on your past logs.

Next year you want to see the even detailed breakdown of your expenses, so you decide to add some tags and other details to every expense. This way you’ll know where you are spending most which will help you in controlling that type of expenses.

Back from the truly fulfilling trip, life continues as usual and you continue making wise spending choices. Over the past few months, the app has never let you forget logging your expenses and now on an evening at the end of the first quarter of the new year, you are rewarded with the information about the savings you’ve done in the first quarters of previous two years. You scroll down to see the details of where you’ve been able to reduce the spending.

Feeling deeply satisfied with the your financial achievement and the progress towards your goal of buying your own house, you go to bed for a good nights sleep.

Floney is one of my personal side projects which was conceived from the motivation to know where were I spending, how much were I spending and what’s been the trend like, so that I could improve my spending habits and save or invest as much as possible to achieve my important goals and be financially secure.

It was 2009, only couple of years since the first iPhone was launched and the future looked clearly mobile first for most of personal computing needs. Having strong belief in the fact that the app will have be the mobile-first due the way we envisioned people using it, it was decided that the minimum viable product (MVP) will be built for the iPhone which was used by our primary user group.

In order to turn my idea in to a real product which could be used by other people too, I did some research to understand if there’s an unfulfilled user needs that could be satisfied with the solution I am envisioning. During the initial round of user research, I interviewed about 7 people who were a sample from our target user group which was the the young people who had gotten into steady jobs for a few years now and looking forward to save for some of the biggest spendings of their lives such as buying a house or pay off a long standing loan, etc.

Throughout the research, it was observed that the idea of logging and analyzing expenses was not new to most of the people but the need to be disciplined in doing it was a major challenge.

Many people procrastinate expense logging because of nature of the activity. It’s labor intensive every way and often times the rewards are not worth the time and energy. Yet, all of the research participants exhibited the necessity to keep track of their expenses somehow as much as possible.

During research, I saw that the people who logged their expenses did so in a lot different ways using the tools they felt comfortable using. Some people used more than one tool too. However, the workflow was pretty common. People would save the receipts of the transactions and make a manual record of it in their preferred tool. At the end of the year, they would try to get some idea about where they have spent most from the logged data.

The research clearly showed that in order to drive meaningful user engagement the solution must be supremely efficient in logging expenses and reward users from time to time for their investment in terms of time and efforts. That’s why the app was architected in a way that every time users open it, they see some status or activity that communicates something valuable about the big picture of their financial situation. Plus, from there they get quick access to log expenses.

The app is very small sized with a simple architecture and only one major workflow which was expense logging.

Floney solves a major problem related to expense logging which was previously faced by users. Because the app is be installed on their smartphones, whenever they have to log expenses they would simply take their smartphones which is always with them and just do a few taps, be it when they are sitting in front of their TV or walking out of a grocery store or while having lunch. It’s that easy and once they didi it for a few days, it became a habit. The app would also nudge them with occasional notifications, in case they didn’t log an expense for some time. The most important challenge the design had overcome as a part of this problem is that flow of logging expenses and related micro-interactions.

Because the process of logging expenses was all manual, the design goal in this regard was straightforward: make logging expenses faster, smoother and deeply satisfying.

In the final design, users are not only able to log one or more expenses quicker than they thought but also have the flexibility to take time and log any additional Information such as the place of transaction, events, etc. The beauty is the app learns from the historical data and predicts to automatically populate some information while logging a new expense. For example, if you always purchase your car cleaning shampoo from Amazon then the app would pull the seller as amazon, category as cleaning supplies as soon as you type same item name which you have been using. This is tremendously efficient and makes expense logging blissful.

Accompanies some sample users to the grocery stores and performing several iterations of prototyping and user testing helped me come up a common pattern in the way people think and remember things while logging an expense. This flow would have the least cognitive load on the users, therefore make the process painless.

Another important design task was choosing the right methods for data visualization which would show the macro picture of users financial situation. I chose two types charts to show the big picture.

A donut chart chosen to show the breakup of total YTD expenses from which the users can know what are some of the biggest of all the expenses.
A grouped bar chart would show users year over year comparison of all the expense categories so that the users know the trend of different expenses.

This would help users in determining where to control the money and where they can afford to spend a little extra or keep steady.

I worked backwards from the goals users would have and derived what information would be helpful for the users in that process.

This statistical information would then be combined with the occasionally changing dynamic messages that give users some micro insights. These messages generated by the intelligent software algorithm are focused on the micro aspect that are difficult to derive or understand for an average user only by looking at the charts.

Because the content is about money, the numbers, the report, which requires focus and peace to digest it, the visual design is mostly monochromatic with minimum visual noise. The colors are reserved to convey meaning in context of the information being displayed. The typeface is modern and geometric to retain the aesthetic integrity. Everything here is functional.

Bright and vivid colors accompanied by geometric typeface brought excitement to the boring task of money management. Subtle gradients in graphs and chars enhanced their appearance and felt more dynamic and behavior. Overall, the app did not feel like a traditional book keeping spreadsheet but appeared more like an exciting tool.

Ultimately, with the help of the mobile technology and advanced software algorithms, the design was able to drive the positive change in the way people thought about keeping track of their expenditures.