Case UX — Organizing financial reserves in folders

Having a good financial organization is the key to achieving long-term dreams. How can your bank help you reach your goals?

The first UX case finally got off the ground! In this fictitious situation, I worked with Nubank in order to adapt an already known method of organizing financial reserves, the Envelope Method, into a digital service. Basically, the individual divides his income in different envelopes for specific purposes such as travel, retirement, rent, new car…. Learn more about this method here.

Just type financial education in Brazil on Google to see different news like this. It is also difficult to find a person who does not know someone who has had problems with debt. Or someone who left a dream behind because he couldn’t save. Or someone who is terrified of the finances issue. And so on …
Financial institutions have been investing more and more in technologies in order to provide a good service to their clients and many manage to gather a good amount of money. However, the great deficiency still comes from the lack of knowledge in organizing personal finances, which often causes us to lose focus (and economies).
The request for separation of folders had already been raised by the bank’s own users.

ASSUMPTIONS
Before starting the research process, I raised some assumptions about what the question of financial organization would be like for Brazilians and organized them in a CSD matrix.

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The research

The questionnaire’s intuition was to validate the above assumptions, understand a little more about the Brazilian’s financial habits, define the persona who would most benefit from this solution, and find out if it would really be useful to implement a new savings organization functionality within the app. A total of 102 people shared their habits and experiences, showing the following results:

VALIDATIONS AND PERSPECTIVE:
In fact, people are giving up on going to the bank and resorting to in-app services. Thus, the act of withdrawing and keeping cash at home is also rare.
In order to organize their expenses, the rates were well balanced between people who have a maximum spending limit per month or who organize themselves for it, and people who admit they do not control anything.
After paying the expenses, they transfer the remaining money from the salary to savings and other investments, or just leave it accumulating in the current account.
When they need to save for something specific, the same is done: money sent for savings or accumulates in the current account. Others prefer to buy by credit card and pay in installments.
When it comes to credit cards, most people have had debts or know someone who has.
The public today saves money mostly for: traveling, buying their own home, buying or exchanging a car, purchasing an electronic (video game, cell phone, etc.) or just for an emergency reservation. Many no longer have other expenses focused on this goal, however, others end up spending this money where they shouldn’t.
It is this kind of challenge that this project seeks to solve: to reduce the chance of people falling into distractions and spending the money that was separate on other things 😊

PROPOSAL
Implement, within the money saved area of ​​the Nubank app, personalized folders by the customer to leave their reservation divided according to their plans, without mixing with the others. So every month, the person will be able to send their savings wherever they want: travel plan, apartment plan, new car plan… and so on!

PERSONA:
We will then give our users a face and better understand their difficulties according to the results of the survey. With so much information received from people with completely different realities, I created 2 personas:

STORYTELLING:
To have a little more detail, I put together a story for Nathally, based on the Pixar Storytelling technique.

Once upon a time there was Nathally, who was 22 years old and had dreamed of going to Disney since she was 18.
Every day she was torn between college in the morning and working at the mall store until night.
One day Nathally saw that no matter how much she tried to save for her dream trip, the money did not pay. But deep down she knew why: every time she saw a showcase on sale she was there, swiping the card.
Because of this, she decided that she would start to separate part of the salary for the trip, another part of the salary for graduate school and only what was left over from that she would spend. The travel and postage money would be hidden away, out of her sight.
Nathally started depositing the rest of her salary in her folders within the Nubank app. She sent R $ 200 to Disney here, R $ 150 reais to the post folder there … many times she even received extra money in the month and already sent it straight to the trip!
Until finally after a few months of sending the money to the right place and without spending, she was shocked: she opened the account and saw that she already had R $ 6,000 separate to make her dream come true!

Sketches

That was the time to burn the neurons, tear up papers and give up at least 3 different ideas that I had in mind. When thinking about the plan, it seems infallible, but it was enough to put it on paper to find the weaknesses and have to think about new solutions.

WIREFRAMES:

After several adjustments found in the drafts, the time has come to start putting it on the screen.

HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE:
After years of just using Photoshop, I ventured into creating the first project on Figma. Click here to access the high-fidelity prototype!