The era of finance tech apps is here to stay for our good. Be it for investments, great credit cards, or financial planning, these apps are here to help and simplify the lives of consumers and how they make financial decisions. We at Startaê worked on a redesign exercise experimenting a great interface and interactions for a finance app.
The Challenge
Most of the fintech apps in Brazil have the focus on showing the total balance on the home screen, but without separation of accounts. They also show too much information at the same time. Therefore they end up losing the opportunity to show what’s essential the user. Our challenge was to bring more gamification to decision making, stimulate financial planning, goal-setting bring visual improvements and pleasant interactions.
The Home Dashboard
In this four days exercise, we discussed a lot what information should be available on this first screen that we consider to be the main one. The balance is relevant, but it doesn’t matter that much without triggers or recommendations of what to do with that money. With that in mind, we brought the user’s financial health score to that first interface based on his financial reality, planned and the financial health score. The interface informs the user the full balance of the investments where they can establish goals and choose financial institutions to invest.
The Financial Points Game
This feature is one of the good ones that we listed as a must-have. To create greater user engagement, we apply gamification concepts to almost dashboard component that reinforces the idea of keeping your “financial health” in a better way. To this healthy way, the user needs to keep up three basic principles: spend less money than what comes in, budgeted 25% of the total amount for investment and avoid interests on the overdraft or credit cards (based in a huge factor of higher indebtedness here in Brazil).
Budgeting
Our approach here was to put in the user’s hands the fixed and variable monthly expenses. Fixed expenses can be subscriptions such as Spotify, Netflix, housing expenses, and variable expenses are food, leisure, and health, for example. The important thing here was to show the amounts that it needs to be budgeted for fixed expenses and set maximum amounts to variable costs dividing by week or month.
Results
A product like this can easily get cluttered and full of unnecessary features if not designed mindfully. Our proposal in this exercise was to re-imagine existing interfaces in applications that we love, creating an experience that focuses on what’s essential but also making easy and fun to use. In the end, what matters is to help people plan and organize their financial life.
