Archive · Past Project
04Interview Design Exercise · 2017

Financial App for Young Professionals

A mobile budgeting app for young professionals with unstable or irregular incomes — freelancers, gig workers, seasonal earners — who were being underserved by financial tools designed for white-collar stability.

Duration 1 week Role End-to-end concept — research, IA, wireframes Context Interview design exercise

The tension that made this interesting

Most financial apps were designed for people with stable monthly incomes and predictable expenses. The budgeting logic, the alert systems, the goal-setting frameworks — all assumed a salary and a fixed set of spending categories. But the fastest-growing segment of young workers in the U.S. operated on the opposite model: variable income from multiple sources, irregular pay cycles, spending that fluctuated wildly week to week.

The real problem wasn't budgeting — it was estimation. Users couldn't predict what they'd earn in a given month, which made the traditional "set a budget, track against it" model useless. What they needed was a system that treated uncertainty as a first-class condition, not an edge case.

"Most tools were designed for financial stability. The users who needed the most help were the ones with the least of it."

What the research surfaced

Three quick interviews with people who regularly overspent revealed behavioral patterns that the competitive benchmarking had missed entirely.

01
Embarrassment as motivation
The moment a card declined at a cashier was more motivating than any abstract budget number. Design needed to work with this emotional trigger, not ignore it.
02
Multiple payment channels = multiple blind spots
Users held reward cards, prepaid cards, store cards, credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay simultaneously. Total balance across all channels was invisible — and that invisibility was the root cause of overspending.
03
Cash economy was larger than expected
Initial assumption: most transactions were digital. Reality: tips, informal income, and physical cash were significant for the target user group. The app needed to account for cash, not pretend it didn't exist.
04
Goals as behavioral anchors
When users had a concrete goal — a trip, a purchase, a savings milestone — they spent differently. The goal needed to be visible at the moment of spending, not buried in a separate section.

The design direction

A holistic balance view — not a budget tracker. Rather than asking users to set budgets they couldn't reliably predict, the app surfaced a single "available to spend" number that aggregated across all connected accounts and payment methods in real time.

Color as financial health signal. Inspired by competitive research, the dashboard used color to communicate spending health at a glance — removing the need to read numbers to understand status. Green, yellow, red — calibrated to the user's own patterns, not a fixed threshold.

Goals front and center. Financial goals appeared on the main dashboard, not a sub-screen. Every spending decision happened in the context of what it was moving the user toward or away from.

Faster card sync. Scanning physical cards with the camera (rather than entering credentials) reduced the friction of connecting multiple accounts — critical for users with many payment methods.

What the testing taught me

The shared budget concept failed. Designed to let young earners partially dependent on parents request the right amount at the right time — users couldn't understand it quickly enough. The concept needed far more onboarding than a 1-week exercise allowed for.

Goal visibility worked. Users consistently referenced their goals when making spending decisions during the test — exactly the behavior the design was trying to elicit. The placement was right; the visual treatment needed refinement.

The bigger learning: designing for populations whose primary financial challenge is instability — not optimization — requires a fundamentally different conceptual model, not just a reskin of existing tools. The insight still applies to how I think about designing for underserved populations a decade later.

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