The ultimate app for collaborative budgeting and saving.
Simply Save
Overview
Role: Sole UX designer Tools: Figma Duration: 4 weeks
Managing personal finances often feels like a solo mission, even though many financial decisions involve the people around us—partners, roommates, or family. Recognizing this gap, we’re redefining personal finance by making it collaborative, enabling you to budget and save together while still providing essential tools like transaction tracking, credit score monitoring, and personal budget management.
The Problem
Users often struggle to save money or stick to a budget when lacking motivation or accountability
Solution:
A tool that allows users to save collaboratively with friends and family can help them stay motivated and on track by fostering a sense of shared purpose and accountability.
Outcome:
The goal of the app is to empower users to manage their finances more effectively by promoting and fostering teamwork, accountability, and transparency. By integrating collaborative tools with individual financial management features, the app encourages users to:
Work Together: Achieve shared financial goals with friends and family through joint saving and budgeting efforts.
Stay Accountable: Track progress and contributions transparently, motivating users to stay on target.
Build Trust and Clarity: Provide clear, real-time updates to avoid miscommunication and ensure everyone involved is on the same page.
Save
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Together
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Budget
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Together
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Save • Together • Budget • Together •
Competitive Analysis
There are numerous finance apps available today, so it is vital to conduct a thorough competitive analysis. This will help me identify what features are resonating with users and reveal any gaps in the market that my app could address.
Currently, most budgeting apps like Rocket Money, Empower, and Goodbudget focus on personal financial management and do not offer features specifically designed for collaborative financial activities such as adding friends or family to your shared budget or sharing progress on savings goals.
Market Research
To understand my users' needs, I conducted extensive market research to identify their pain points and find effective solutions to address those challenges.
I discovered that:
74% of Americans have a monthly budget, yet 84% of those with a budget say they exceed it
43% of American couples have only joint bank accounts, while 57% have a mix of joint and separate accounts
44% use a credit card to pay for the additional purchases they make
20% dipped into savings to pay for additional expenses.
User Surveys
User surveys: I conducted 20 surveys with users and discovered that
About 40% of users didn’t track their spendings because they would go over budget on a monthly basis
65% of users say they are more likely to stick to a budget if they collaborated with friends or family
Group savings led to 25% higher contribution rates than individual plans
Challenges:
Users may worry about others overspending or mismanaging funds
Users may hesitate to share financial data or spending habits
Individuals in the group may have different priorities when it comes to saving or budgeting
IA & User Flow
In the next phase, I focused on defining the information architecture and user flow.
What would an efficient and intuitive setup for a savings or budgeting group look like?
Design Process
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Design Process ✏️
Wireframe and Low Fidelity Prototype
When I began my design process, I conducted extensive market research to understand what worked well for some companies and what fell short. I asked myself:
What makes an intuitive approach to managing finances?
How do users typically feel when navigating financial tools?
Reflecting on these questions inspired me to create a design that’s not only simple and intuitive but also easy for anyone to use.
Usability Test
After conducting a usability test with 8 users, I learned that there were some concerns from users that I needed to address.
“Are others going to be able to withdraw my money?”
“Will everyone be able to see how much I have to spend or use? :\”
“What if I want to be able to save for different occasions with different people?”
The Solution & Final Design Process
In order to ensure that we could address all of the users concerns, we designed the app to
Ensure that users cannot withdraw funds from their group savings; they can only withdraw what they put into their savings
Allow users to enable whether or not their group can see how much they are saving
Users are able to create multiple savings goals or budgets depending on what they value
The final design process was then completed to be intuitive and easy to use so that users don’t feel stress when managing their finances or budgets, especially when collaborating with others to ensure that they still are able to maintain their privacy.
Reflection
I gained a great deal of knowledge from this project and truly enjoyed working on it. Even after completing the app, I see many opportunities to enhance it further to better serve users. Some potential improvements include:
Incorporating AI to provide personalized recommendations and insights.
Fostering a more social community by adding features like commenting, following, or sharing progress.
Introducing motivational elements such as notifications or badges to celebrate milestones and inspire users.
Allowing users to personalize their dashboard’s appearance to ensure that the app is catering to their specific needs.
This experience also taught me the importance of user testing and feedback in app development. I realized that user insights revealed critical areas for improvement that I wouldn’t have identified otherwise.
In future projects, I plan to prioritize gathering detailed and meaningful user feedback by:
Designing more comprehensive user surveys to uncover specific pain points.
Testing features with a wider audience to ensure the app meets diverse user needs.
These lessons will help me create even more impactful and user-centered solutions in the future.