Designing a Personal Finance Dashboard that fits everybody’s needs
In this case study, you’ll find out how I designed a Personal Finance Dashboard that gives users a holistic view of their finances
Where it all started
Picture this: in this chaotic world, where expenses disguise them in another form and having everything at your disposal all the time makes it hard for you to see where all your money is going and how to save it for future?….
In the ever-evolving landscape of personal finance, individuals face the daunting challenge of managing their financial affairs efficiently. The existing tools and platforms often fall short in providing a holistic and user-friendly solution, leaving users overwhelmed and frustrated.
First millennials, and now as Gen Zs are also joining the work force, the need of a tool that help users track their finances and guide them towards the next steps finance independence has increased drastically.
What needs to be
The goal is to create an intuitive, engaging, and comprehensive platform that transforms the way individuals perceive and manage their finances, ultimately fostering a sense of control and financial well-being.
I sat down with 3 goals in mind while working on this project-
- Increase finance awareness among the target audience
- Implement basic features like expense tracking, investment tracking, budgeting and setting goals.
- Encourage users towards wealth building and risk aversion
In this case study, I have tried to design a high fidelity personal finance dashboard user interface.
Role: Product Designer
Scope: 1 week
Process: Research, surveys, competitor analysis, designing, prototyping and user testing
Tools: Google Meet, Figma and Figjam
Research
For conducting user research, I narrowed down my user demographic to-
- Age- 18 to 28 years
- Location- Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities
- Occupation- Salaried and Business caretaker
I conducted a series of a small user persona interview with my acquaintances through google meet and phone calls to paint a picture of how people manage their finances with the help of few predefined questions-
- How often do you track and budget your incomes and expenses?
- What are the biggest challenges or pain points you currently face when managing your personal finances?
- What specific financial goals or milestones are most important to you in the short term and long term?
- How much time are you willing to invest in actively managing your finances on a regular basis?
- Do you use some specific tools that helps you manage your finances? If yes, do those tools lack in any of your use cases?
Those interviews gave some key insights helped in the project-
- 89% of the interviewees said that they not regularly but often track their expenses and have created budgets for different expenses.
- 66% of the interviewees said that they try/want to invest monthly but they often don’t know how much to invest or they forget to invest.
- 77% of the interviewees said that they are willing to spend 10–15 minutes daily for tracking/journaling their finances.
- 89% of the interviewee had different parameters/data points they wanted to track and analysis, but there is no service in market that provides that level of customisation.
- 55% of the interviewees said that they have tried Excel and Notion for budgeting but they left them after sometime cause those were too complex to use and that they is no integration of other applications for auto-tracking.
Product Ideation & Design Exploration
With the problems and goals laid down in front, I started off with some initial brainstorming. My primary task was to freeze all the features that the product will offer.
Initially, I explored multiple different layouts to design the dashboard that the user will interact with as soon as they land on the application. The idea was to make it user friendly and simple to operate. I experimented with various types graphs and charts to present the data in a visual format.
But every time I was coming back to the same question, will this cater everybody’s needs? Will everybody agree with the hierarchy in which I have laid the information in?
As this is the matter of managing personal finance, the dashboard should be personalised too. I was very impressed with Apple, how they implemented widget in IOS and MacOS. I took the inspiration from Apple widgets and created a similar functionality for Zippi.
The dashboard is divided into 5 columns where the widgets can be placed based on user preferences.
Consistent widgets are designed to showcase different types of informations, efficiently and neatly. These widgets are reusable for multiple types of personalised financial data depending upon user to user, for example, stock holdings, asset allocation, credit card bills, monthly EMIs, etc. The dynamic widgets help the users to assort their financial data in more refined manner.
The idea is to provide a simple drag and drop functionality to the users, to aid them in customising their dashboard based on their financial priorities. The users also have an option to access and input the data by clicking on the widget.
The product also includes an analytics dashboard that comes with a different set of widgets. These widgets gather the existing data and present it in a more informative view. User directly benefits from this in-depth analysis, which in turn help them make better financial decisions.
User Testing
I mocked up an interactive prototype using Figma. I conducted a usability test moderated and in-person, using 3 helpful volunteers (flatmates). I presented them each with the high fidelity mockups and asked them how will they operate the dashboard and took notes as they carried out the test.
Findings:
User #1-
The UI looks good and clean. The functionality seems interesting and easy to use.
User #2-
Although the dashboard is fairly informative, there is some learning curve to it. Overall love the idea.
User #3-
In first impression, the product looks promising. Although looks like it’ll be more popular among the enthusiast.
And that’s a wrap!
Thank you for sticking around till the end of this case study, it means a lot to me! This was an amazing project to work on. During this project, I came to understand the more you listen your users, the better your product will turn out to be. It involves a cycle of ideation, feedbacks and re-iterations. Although a lot more improvements can be done with more research and ideation.
Through this project, I gained confidence in understanding users and critical thinking. I immensely enjoyed working on this project.
You can reach out to me at Linkedin & Behance for work and collaborations.
