We began our process by doing an assessment of the existing screens in the app by applying some heuristics to get a better idea of the user experience. We recognized a number of roadblocks, such as, the Onboarding process being too long, "Journey" screen was cluttered and difficulty for the user to discern the details, "Feed" wasn't engaging and cluttered, the illustrations used weren't homogeneous, the overall layout with the black border was limiting the screen space and some other design inconsistencies.

According to the heuristics used, the order of priority of updates were assigned as follows:

The user feedback from the actual users of the existing application was taken and the recurring pain points were:

From the existing information about the users of our app, we gauged our main persona to be a college student.

Through brainstorming and sketching the flows, we narrowed down our ideas on the architecture and the user flow.
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Then I sketched low fidelity wireframes and iterated upon it.

First a new design system was created by refining the brand colors and improving on the CTAs and icons by making them sleeker and modern.
Taking into account the user feedback, we eliminated the black backgrounds and decided upon an all white approach.

Icons in the old design, especially in the navbar were inconsistent, hard to understand and too complicated. So I completely revamped the iconography to make it more intuitive and cleaner.

My goal was to make the onboarding as short and engaging as possible, while still allowing the app to gather the required information from the user.

The old design had every step in a different page, which made the onboarding process quite long and tiresome. I combined the unnecessarily split pages into one and used the second page to get further information from the user which wasn't being taken in the old flow.

The information gathered from the onboarding questions played a key part in how Finllect’s algorithm worked, but the onboarding questions were designed in a way that was not engaging or easy to use.  There was no feedback, type was too small and the illustrations were very inconsistent. I improved the design by adding more space for good copy, and giving the user good feedback when they click on any answer. Finally, I further incentivized the user by giving them a Community Badge, as soon as they complete the onboarding questions.

The journey page is where the user can look at the financial products they pre-qualify for, their transactions and the points and stickers they earned.

I completely revamped the journey section of the application. Initially, they had crammed everything together into one long scrollable page. This was hard to understand and not fun for the user to use as it should have been. So I changed the information architecture, and split the “Journey” section into multiple pages

The “Tracking history” section was not intuitive and did not provide enough details in the old design. Yet, it was an important feature of the app. So I created a new page for “My Transactions” where the user can toggle between different months and have breakdowns of how they spent their money.

Also cool things like the stickers which would have increased user retention were hidden behind a small icon that everybody would miss. Therefore, I created another page called “Challenges” which housed the stickers and what the user had to do to get them.

Also, I was tasked with designing a new feature of the app called “Prequalify” which allows the user to be prequalified to financial products if they kept their finllect points above a certain limit. This was their latest feature. For legal reasons, they had to get further information from the users in order to do so, and I designed that flow.

This page is where the customer can link their bank accounts, add transactions, check their credit score, scan documents and take quizzes to increase the credit score. The goal was to make the process of adding transactions as clean and segregated as possible, so the budgeting could be done easily by the app.

I revamped the entire flow, where previously they could only add check ins, now this page housed, further new features such as “Linking bank account”, “Past check-ins” etc. Still, to make the check in process easy, the most prominent CTA is the “Add New Transaction” button.

When the user clicks the “Add New Transaction” button, they are taken directly to this flow. I was cognizant about making it as smooth as possible. The 3rd screen with extra details was required to improve the Finllect algorithm. The illustration on the 3rd screen would change depending on what type of transaction they select. For example, here it is “charity and donation”.

“Credit Score” was the latest feature Finllect was incorporating. It was a score that could help the user become pre-qualified with banks for financial products. The user could improve their score on Finllect by recurring payments, proper budgeting and also taking part in quizzes. I wanted to make the credit score board a very attractive and engaging page because this is where the user will have to keep coming back. Therefore, I added a lot of fun feedback and copy while also making the data visualization look clean.

Using the above designed screens, I created a clickthrough prototype of the newly designed app, to show as an example for the developers and other stakeholders.

This project was my first one in a start-up environment and it was an eye-opener. I was involved in every stage of process and I got invaluable experience in collaborating with other stakeholders, brainstorming as a team, prototyping and creating design systems.

If I could do this project differently, I would have spent more time for user research and testing. I would have done more user interviews, flushed out the personas better and also done some A/B testing. But I guess, these are the realities of a young start-up with a time and money crunch.

Although, looking back at the project with my current knowledge, I realize that the colours chosen while pretty, does not meet the accessibility standards. Design is much more than just how something looks. It is about how well it works. Unfortunately, the importance of designing with accessibility in mind is something that I realized and learned much later.

Even though I worked many months on this redesign, the product eventually did not ship. Personnel changed and a completely new design direction was taken right from the brand guidelines. Nevertheless, this was an amazing learning opportunity for me. Being a small start-up, I was involved in all aspects of design. Apart from this redesign, I worked with the developers to design a new admin dashboard, designed social media campaigns, marketing material and pitch decks. All in all, great (but hectic!) experience.