Swift Finance: Behind the scenes
Part 1- Tracking your finances
Part 2- Saving for your goals
Part 3- Behind the scenes— you’re here 📍
In our last blog, we saw how Swift Finance helped Aarushi to effectively achieve her goal. We also explored some other ways to transfer money.
In this case study, I want to discuss my learning from the usability tests. But first, let’s discuss the last goal which was: To educate users for better financial literacy.
The third tab in the app solves just this goal.
The app will curate resources (paid/unpaid )from the internet in the form of articles, video courses. The app will access reading behavior to curate more personalized content. Other basic things the user could do are sharing, bookmarking, following favorite author etc.
One thing to note is the “Learn” and “Market Place” tabs will show all third party content. The aim of this app is to consolidate things that a user may need to manage their finances.
App Information Architecture
The app has 4 sections on a higher level —
- Dashboard to see financial picture
- My Goals to save effectively
- Learn to learn about finances
- Market Place to explore different financial products — investments, loans, credit cards
The Dashboard
The dashboard is the place where a user could see their financial health. The app will track and show their
- Income
- Expenses
- Balance left to spend/save
- Savings
- Debts
To see details about investments and insurances, a user could upload consolidated account statements (CAS) which are given by organizations like CAMS, Karvy, CDSL, NSDL.
Now inside each subcategory, a user can view details, analytics, insights etc.
The rest app is focused in to save and learn. The market place is a curation of other financial Apps/websites which is highly targetted based upon the financial health of the user. For eg. If your age is more than 25 and you fall on a higher tax bracket, it will suggest some insurance websites.
Nudges through the insights
The app will give you insights based on the stage you’re in. Things like “year in review”, “spending insights”, “Income vs Expense vs Saving comparison” could be helpful to improve your financial health.
In-app analytics
Analytics uncovers patterns that could be helpful to draw deeper insights. For example, the app identifies the top spends, Avg spends for each category, Most frequent spends.
Working backward from usability tests
Following are some responses from people I tested my solutions on
1. The screen looks filled. I don’t know where to start
When a user saw the track page, it took them time to read and understand, what is going on. They missed the summary of what’s earned, what’s spent what’s left and what’s saved. Here are some conversations from them:
Oh I get it, I had to really focus on what is written over here.
I missed reading what was written under the budget circle.
I thought that the top half would change as I change the tab.
It’s good but feels a lot.
In the next iteration, I gave each sub-category a seperate tab which reduces the number of interactive elements in the screen.
2. Goals are good. but can I adjust them if my priority changes?
A use case of when a user is having multiple goals (flexible and fixed) and they want to a new goal but they have used all the saving budget. In that case, they may need to readjust their previous goals to free up some money for their new goal.
If I want to one more goal, will I have to adjust previous goals one by one to free up money?
I like this feature. so it creates different buckets for each goal. Can I shift my money from one bucket to another as well?
Can I change the propotions of money going to each bucket?
To change the proportion a user needs to see a distribution of their goals. So I added a linear distribution that can be edited at once. The users can drag the handles to adjust the proportions or they could also adjust a particular goal.
It is to be noted that for fixed goals, one cannot simply drag the handle but need to go a level deeper to adjust them.
3. It will be helpful if you could make the listing more visual
People couldn’t see that the listing also showcased the budget constraints for each category.
I can see how I spent in each category
Why there are two numbers?
1,500 over means I spent over by 1,500. you can highlight it in red or something
I don’t care how much is the budget. I just want to see how much I’m over or under
Some more responses I got which were out of scope at that point of time.
- I collect rent for both of us and transfers that to my landlord
- My roommate and I shares some common expenses like electricity, internet, so it would be good if you give me a splitting option as well.
- I don’t prefer to see my home as an asset for calculation of my net-worth
At the end
Outcomes & Lessons Learned
This project gave me a perspective on how others think when it comes to planning but not just their finances. I think I am a bit OCD about planning, but I feel good when everything is number driven.
As per my requirements, google sheets serve me the best. It gives me the flexibility to create whatever functions/links/tables as I want. But this attempt was to hide all those nerdy stuff and give you a way to handle your finances effortlessly.
In the future, I would love to test this solution to many others and keep discovering new use cases.
What is your take when it comes to financial planning? I would love to know your perspective :)
Check my work on Dribbble: https://dribbble.com/meetdemo
Let’s connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meetdemo/
