UI/UX Design
CHASE - Personal Finance Management
Meet Chase's Personal Finance Management
Chase Bank, owned by JP Morgan, is looking into expanding their mobile app and adding personal finance management capabilities. Chase sees an opportunity to make a difference, and help those millennials with their financial challenges. In order to do this, they would like to round out their offerings by providing users with personalized features that allow them to manage their personal finances. Chase wants to embed this Personal Finance Management feature within the current Chase Bank app with the same design but a fresh and modern color palette.
Note: I do not work for nor am affiliated with Chase. This is a passion project, enjoy!
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Empathize
Discovery
According to the Consumer Federation of America, 71% of American households are involved in very light financial planning, such as basic budgeting and savings goals.
The average debt of a household is $16,000 for those without a mortgage, and $132,500 for those with.
Another sobering fact is that the average credit score for Millennials is below 621 (bad) whereas the average credit score for those 50 and older is considered fair or higher.
JPMorgan Chase’s mobile customers grew by 12% in the third quarter.
The bank last year said that millennials made up “the majority of their new deposit customers”.
Chase found that many of the millennials want a better way to manage their spending than simply trying to adhere to a budget — something they’ve found difficult to do.
Challenge
Taking all of this into account, Chase sees an opportunity to make a difference, and help Millennials with their financial challenges. The typical personal finance management features include saving goals, budgets, calculators, and expense tracking. However, Chase is open to other suggestions as long as they’re supported by research and offer a step forward in their desired direction.
Conceptualize and design a Personal Finance Management feature that embeds smoothly within the current Chase iOS app but new and modern look and color palette. Specifically, include features that could help increase brand loyalty in Chase’s millennial audience.
Research Goals
- To find out what methods do people currently use to manage their finance
- Understanding the latest innovations in banking apps to learn about features and possibilities
- Learn about target users’ pain points when using their banking apps.
- Learn about users’ goals and needs with regards to personal finance.
- Identify potential apps or tools used to supplement users’ banking app.
User Analysis
I created personas to create a clear and detailed picture of my user. At each step of the design process I considered the persona and made all of my decisions based on the actions I thought she would take.
Persona
I refined the persona, Celia, based on my finding from the interviews and surveys. I chose character that represented the target audience – younger people for using this new PFM feature in Chase app. She has a great income for her age but she needs to figure out where most of her money goes every month. She would like to find an easy way to manage her finance through her bank app instead of downloading more than one app to accomplish a task.
Market Research
I did considerable research on today’s financial industry, as well as modern banks and how they are becoming more and more digital. Luckily, there are plenty of studies on millennial and what they like/dislike in virtually every industry- including banking.
Some highlights that inspired the features of Chase’s Budget & Save function:
- %68 people access mobile banking on a regular basis to carry out banking activity, with 48% using a dedicated banking app.
- Most common activity within a mobile banking app is to check a balance.
- As of 2016, 29% are comfortable with paying bills in app, jumped from 20% in 2014.
- 28% uses an app to transfer money and 22% sending money to other people, an increase of 6%.
- Bank rate found 83% of millennials don’t think they’ll ever retire: they simply “don’t think they’ll have the money” to do so
- In 2015, 30% of people ages 18-29 were using mobile payments, 32% ages 30-44. 20% ages 45-59, 13% ages 60+: This statistic shows that people ages 18-44 are making up 62% of mobile payment users
- When using mobile phones for purposes asked, 38% of users responded that they already track finances, purchases or expenses, with 14% of users saying they would like to.
- 71% of millennials say its very important to have a banking app
- 60% say its important to have an app to make payments
- The early adopters of technology supplement their traditional banks with Fintech platforms amount to 67.3% as compared to only 30% of those who are less tech-savvy.
- Mobile banking is preferred by the millennial from a mobile wallet, online deposit, to fund transfers.
- The millennial need to be more informed about finance management
- The millennial value financial advice from their peers more so than financial professionals or parents.
- Most common uses for mobile banking app are account balance update, transfer funds, and bill pay.
- Most financial institutions partner with fin-tech startups to leverage their technical expertise to integrate with their legacy system instead of building out the features internally.
- Specialty finance apps such as Stash, Qapital are some of the market disruptors in the banking space that promise better and more efficient ways to bank and save on your terms.
Competitive Analysis
Summary of Research
GENERAL TAKEAWAYS
- People budget their money to reach their financial goals and control spending.
- People sometimes need help budgeting their money and establishing financial goals.
- One of the reasons saving is important is for unexpected emergencies.
- While people do budget regularly, they stay on top of their finances more when they have big purchases or major life events that require spending a large amount of money.
- Users share feelings of uncertainty about how to plan and how much they should be saving.
APP SPECIFIC TAKEAWAYS
- Security is important when using 3rd party apps to budget finances.
- Alerts are nice.
- People have trouble remembering to check their budgeting apps weekly.
- Automation features were reported as very important. People don’t want to have to manually enter a lot of info.
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Define
Project Goals
Using my primary and secondary research, I began to concept the product. I started by deriving business goals from the Chase project brief. After this, I used Celia – the persona – to define user goals. The common goals between business and user goals became the foundation of the first iteration.
Feature Prioritization
From the common goals, I formulated features that were most pertinent to these goals, as well as features that would be great additions for future iterations.
Information Architecture
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App-Map
To Figure out where to add the new feature in the existing Chase mobile app, I created an app map. The feature would be accessible by the menu from the landing page along with existing tools. Due to being the main reasons of using bank app, pay bills and manage account, the budgeting feature would be located right after those tools.
User Flow
I approached the solution by diagramming out an initial user flow, just to see if the main tasks can be intuitively completed within a reasonable number of steps. The first steps of budgeting are necessary for choosing/creating the category to budget money for it.
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Ideate
Wireframe
For my wireframe, I focused on on 4 main aspects of budgeting.
– First being an overview of spending. In my interviews, most people said they budget based on their income and past spending. The overview page would show the amount users spent for the current month and graph showing their spending for each category compared to their income for each month. By clicking on each category, users have access to the overview for the specific category which gives the opportunities to edit the budget at this point.
– Users have access to the Chart to see their spending trend for the past few months. They also can see all transactions which are linked to the category pages.
– Another aspect is allowing user to see budgeting summary and set/edit their own budgets and categorized them under two fixed and flexible group. The set budget page would show the amount of money user have budgeted for the month, the amount they have spent, and the breakdown of how much per category.
– Last but not least, because of the importance of credit score to users, the last aspect was allowing users to stay up to date on their score and provide details that would affect it. They have access by the menu from the landing page.
Branding and UI Kit
With the UI kit, I focused on building upon the brand identity with interactive UI elements. I still want color palette for the new feature to resemble the rest of the app. After building the UI kit, I utilized it to stylize the responsive wireframes from earlier.
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Prototype
High Fidelity Prototype
After completing the low fidelity frames, I asked for some feedback on the screens. Most of the feedback I received mentioned before set Fixed/ flexible budgeting they would like to have the option to use and edit current budget based on their past spending instead of using the blanket budget for new categories.
Final Prototype
I prototyped in Marvel. It showcases the main functionalities of the application. After working out the design scheme and overall navigation, I focused on micro transitions that utilize motion to indicate feedback to user actions.
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Test
Feedback
For user testing, I created a prototype on Marvel and tested a few different features. I sat with four different users and asked them to find the feature in the current Chase app, view their past spending summary, and each specific category. Then I asked them to set budget for each category or edit the existing budget. Overall, the feedback was positive and users were able to navigate with minimal errors. Users really liked the goal-oriented features and the ability to view their spending and set budget easily. Future iterations will involve how to present the capabilities to users so that they understand it is a secure feature.
To organize the results from the user tests, I created an affinity map. Participants who were avid Chase app users thought the new feature was integrated well with the app. One participant was unsure where to click to find their current budget, while another missed the Month/Budget section on the budget details page. All users really liked the capability on the ‘Income & Expenses’ graph, which gave users a better idea of how much they’re spending. Another one asked for more clear ‘Add category’ button to allow for more customization by the user.
“This is exactly what I need in the Chase app.”
The feedback on the feature as a whole, struck a positive note for all the participants. All participants agreed that they would use the app more if it included the budgeting feature.
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Next Step
For my next iteration, I would add an extra setting to the feature allowing users to set long term goals after set their budget and create ‘sub accounts’ that they can rename for what they are saving up for. They would be able to move money from their main account to their sub account every month to save for specific events/wants. This would make the budgeting feature more proactive for the users. Instead of only showing users’ spending history and allowing them to set spending limits, it would let users to actually save for different purposes and track their finances even better.
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