Money is a financial management tool which is designed to keep track of your finances – on your bank account and in your pocket.
Challenge
While there are many solutions for financial management we saw a gap: most apps either consider cash tracking or electronic banking. We wanted to do both and focus on a large demographic, not just digital natives who are ready to ditch analog banking all together.
How might we create an application, that helps you to document your finances simple, fast and clearly?
The documentation of finance requires a lot of initiative and discipline. To get reliable data of one's personal sale behavior, transactions must be continuously entered into applications. Existing applications usually shift their focus on transactions that were made with credit cards. Most applications forget that most of the payments in Germany are still made with cash. Money tackles these problems and tries to provide a documentation and reflection of one's personal stream of cash quickly and easily.
Solution
A multi-efficient Management Software
Money consists of a two-component system. A mobile application enables the possibility to document your cash money fast. Within the desktop application, Money easily gives you a financial overview.
Desktop Application
The desktop version of money provides a larger overview. It offers filterable transactions histories and interactive data visualizations. Besides the desktop application Money provides the ability to optimize its financial flow by creating etas and reserves. It’s main purpose is to allow deeper analyzation of ones spending behavior.
Mobile Application
The mobile application is stripped-down and condensed. It focuses on a quick overview of your current money, your budgets and the latest transactions. The main feature is the seamless process of adding an expense. With the aid of the mobile application the user can document his current cash flow in everyday life. Money informs the user about arranged etas and recent made transactions. Through intelligent suggestions, context-related instructions and dynamic responding to user inputs, the application provides an extra value.
Process
We created this project using a basic waterfall process with Personas, User Storys, Use Case and Flowcharts in the beginning. Creating a seamless experience in terms of functionality and visual consistency across the two devices was definitely the hardest challenge. Therefore our process was driven by fast iterations and low fidelity prototypes in order to test and validate the concepts in real world scenarios. Regarding the visual design different product characters were defined and critiqued in terms of understandability, readability and clarity.
Learnings
Creating a product which gives users a nudge, especially to keep on tracking their cash transactions, we strongly focused on usability, micro interactions and consistency. From todays view, we should rather have focused on reducing the application to it's main value. Tracking the cash transactions and creating an integration into existing applications. My role in this project, was thinking through existing applications and turning those pain points into value and gains into benefits. Later on, I was involved in creating consistent flows between both applications and designing easy to understand vizualisations.
