Ascent is a personal finance, mobile-first application. It is aimed towards a tech savvy demographic, who may be new to personal finance. Ascent helps you reach new heights with easy, personalized goal setting.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
I researched other personal finance apps on the market such as Mint, Personal Capital and Nerdwallet, to synthesize strengths, weaknesses and optimization opportunities. The objective for this project was to create a personal finance app that helps people to save money, quickly, for a particular reason. The users are not new to technology, but do not like working with their finances. The app needed to be accessible and straight-forward.
_____________________
USER RESEARCH & TESTING
I conducted remote moderated user testing with 3 users, and an InVision interactive prototype. Common pain points and confusion emerged that I needed to quickly address in my wireframe iterations:
• Multiple users questioned why the credit card interest rate would need to be manually filled in.
SOLUTION: Auto populate interest rates and minimum payment information.
• Confusion about the redundancy of having the ‘Date Pay Off By’ on a second page.
SOLUTION: Consolidating the ‘Pay Off’ information all on one long scrolling page.
• Confusion about which credit card would be the one selected.
SOLUTION: Include a small icon of credit card as visual cue indicating which credit card it is.
_____________________
From there, I was able to synthesize the information from the User Testing and create applicable User Stories and a corresponding User Flow for the app, to achieve user end goals.
WIREFRAMES & PROTOTYPES
Once the user flow was established, I was able to start iterating on the wireframes. Using a mobile-first approach, I continuously refined the wireframes based on user feedback based on an interactive prototype.
BRAND GUIDELINES
After polishing up the high-fidelity wireframes, I established the brand guidelines. From there, I was able to create a UI Kit for all of the reusable interactive components.
RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN
Once the final UI and polished mockups were completed, I created a responsive web version of Ascent. I wanted to keep the focus on all of the functions that were necessary, so that the user can focus on their goals.