Budgetwell
A budgeting app for college students that keeps in mind their spending habits, likely financial situations, and prepares them for the post college financial world.
Project Type
Timeline
Colaboration
Academic
Fall Semester
August 2022-December 2022
Collaborated with 3 other group members
My Role
Tools Used
Oversaw both research and design. I collaborated in all sections. Also responsible for ideating and implementing the budgeting feature present in our final design.
Pen & Paper, Google Docs, and Figma
The Problem
As college students, my group and I related most to the problem of struggling with managing our finances. College is the first time most people are out living on their own. It can be hard to keep spending habits under control and create/ keep track of efficient budgets that work.
Our Approach
Before we could design our app we had to do some research. This included getting some context statistics, creating a stakeholder map, and conducting user interviews. From conducting user interviews and putting together an affinity map with common themes from participant responses, we learned some very helpful things. We came to realize that most participants didn’t use budgeting apps because most apps seem designed for adults rather than college students. Due to this, the apps were to complex and overwhelm college students with necessary features and concepts like investing in stocks, salaries, taxes, budgeting for homeowner-like bills, etc. We also learned that college students mismanage their money the most by overspending on food and or social activities. With this information our goal was to create a simplistic budgeting app for college students that keep in mind their spending habits and their likely financial situations. It also overtime would teach them to be disciplined and prepare them for the financial world post-college.
Once we came up with an approach and formulated our goals it was time to begin designing. First we created a user flow diagram. Then came lo-fi sketches. We then translated our lo fi sketches to figma to create lo-fi prototyopes and conducted a round of user testing. Based on our feedback we created mid-fi prototypes which brought us to the end of the semester.
Our Design
User Flow
Lo-Fi Sketches
Lo-Fi to Mid-Fi
Demo
Home
This is our home page but before you view the homepage you must log in or sign up.
Reflection
Budget
This is our budget page where you can create a monthly budget. You also can view how much money you have spent for the month and how much you have left.
Transactions
This is our transactions page where you can log your transactions for when spend money or receive money. You can also view recent transactions made, edit, and more.
Limits/Notifications
This is our limit and notifications page where you can set limits to how much you can spend and be notified about spending habits
Insights
This is our insights page where you can view your spending habits in different graphs and even receive some tips to better improve your budget.
With some inconveniences we encountered in addition with the time constraints that come with a semester long class, our team only made it to mid-fi level prototypes. However, if given more time we know we could reach hi-fi and really polish up what we started. I think I did a great job of managing my team to the best of my ability. Our mid-fi designs turned out pretty good as well. given our skill level. Some things I can improve upon include teaching members of the team how to communicate to one another more effectively as there were many times when communication was an issue within the group and with our instructors. I also believe as a team we could’ve benefited from taking small exercises within class time more seriously. Our next steps would include conducting a second and third round of user testing, using the feed back to bring our designs to hi-fi and even beyond. Once the full design has been completed I believe there is maybe more content to add such as integrating a system that emphasizes taking the “training wheels” off and switching on a mode that would cater to young adults that are new to the real world with different financials problems than college students.