Marcus, an app by Goldman Sachs is an online-only bank offering high-yield savings accounts, high-yield and penalty-free certificates of deposit (CDs), and no-fee personal loans. Marcus has a feature called Insights that organizes all of your finances into a single dashboard which allows you to view expenses and cash flow all in one place. While this feature organizes your finances, it is not a budget planner/ tracker. I want to explore adding an additional feature that allows users to use their insights to then start budgeting all in one place.
For this project, I wanted to focus on researching individuals who budget or are interested in budgeting to get an idea of what they expect from a budget planning app. I also want to get insight on how users would feel about having all of their finances (including a budget) in one place.
Empathize
User Interviews
Who
I spoke with 5 participants who budget for themselves
Goal
I wanted to understand their motivations, process, what tools they currently use, and of course what challenges they face when it comes to budgeting.
Research Survey
Who
I had 21 people participate in my budget survey
Why
In addition to the interviews I wanted to send a survey out to see if I could gain more insight from users while under the time constraints.
Key Insights
Survey
Looking back, it was my first time creating a survey for a UX research project and the questions that I asked could have used a little improvement. The biggest takeaways from this survey was being able to see what platforms participants used to help with their budgeting and I asked an open ended question at the end about what features they would want to see in an app that helped them create a budget.
Define
Problem Statement
The problem I was trying to solve was how to design a user friendly budget feature that simplifies the experience by including all finance information in one place.
Personas
Why
After synthesizing the data from my research, I created a persona who represented my user base in order to continue designing with them in mind.
Meet Oscar!
Ideate
User Flow
Background
I spent a longer amount of time on the user flows really trying to get it right. My first iteration was one very complex flow and after some feedback, I made the decision to create 4 simpler user flows.
Feature Prioritization
Constraints
Given the time constraints I listed out all of the features that I wanted to include and then prioritized them in terms of what should be included and what I could save for later. Initially I thought that onboarding questions would be very important to include, however, after receiving some feedback I realized that much of the questions I was thinking to include for onboarding (demographic questions) were already covered for individuals with a Marcus account.
Since I was adding a feature an existing app, one big rule I wanted to follow was keeping the existing UI design and making sure my design appeared consistent and fit in seamlessly.
Design
LoFi Wireframes
Background
There were many iterations in the low fidelity stage because I found myself running into various roadblocks in my designs. With gratitude to my peers in a group crit, they were asking me questions about my design decisions and overall vision with my feature that I initially couldn’t answer.
As a result, I expanded my vision into 2 separate features: Expense Manager and Budget Planner.
Expense Manager
I decided to not complicate the feature by allowing users to add an entirely new category. Instead, users can customize existing categories if they would like but otherwise Marcus will generate for them
Budget Planner
Having users input some goals and then generate their expenses into a dashboard that gives budgeting tips/ advice that is catered to their habits. along with a notification center.
High Fidelity Screens
Prototype
Conclusion
Next Steps
Takeaways
This ended up being my most challenging project yet. It was my first introduction into the fintech space and my lack of knowledge in this industry definitely showed itself. I think I started too broad with my solutions and across each iteration I had to continuously narrow down my visions. Definitely a really interesting learning experience overall.
Challenges
Overall I was proud of my ability to keep consistent with Marcus’ existing UI. The biggest challenge was realizing that I needed to simplify my flows a bit in order to design them in a clear and usable way.
