A secure collaborative tool for all family financial decisions
roles
UX/UI Designer
scope & constraints
Time: 6 weeks
Team of 4
My key contributions
Conducting interviews
Competitive analysis
Wireframing and prototyping
User Testing
Design iterations based on user testing and client feedback
what is futuremoney
FutureMoney is a platform where families can manage their money together in one centralized location. Their first initiative is an investing platform that allows parents to invest for their child’s future, where parents can create an account, and set up recurring contributions.
Designing a new feature
Our objective was to develop a new "vault" feature, enabling users to securely store critical financial account information and create an emergency binder. This tool would serve as a central hub for essential data, reducing the time and stress associated with accessing such information when it's most needed.
how do people handle important documents
To better understand their current system in handling important family documents, we conducted 5-6 interviews mainly focussing on parents.
interview findings
trust
People are concerned with the safety and security of their important documents
family
People safekeep documents for multiple people, not just themselves
accessibility
People who are not the ones “in charge” of safekeeping important family documents still need to use them
competitive analysis
Based on the insights from our interviews we compared several apps and observed how these apps:
Handle permission and sharing
Handle file management
Ensure security
Trustworthy gave us the richest insights such as opportunities regarding security, best practices and reminder systems.
our approach
Our aim was to create a user-friendly interface that would assure parents of the vaults:
convenience - for frequent access
centralization - to store & retrieve documents
security - to store & share sensitive information
big decisions
To address our users concerns, we created personas and journey maps to guide and support several of our design decisions.
Placing the vault in the navbar
Users see the Vault as a tool that is meant to be used periodically - not just for the rare extreme occasions. This insight motivated our decision to place the Vault in the NavBar.
combining the account and transfers tab
To make room for the vault, we combined what was in the Transfers tab and put it inside the Accounts Tab. Based on feedback we received from our client, we gave “Transfers” a presence in FutureMoney’s homepage.
2 browsing methods
To address the issue of organizing and file management, we used two methods for the discovery of documents. Users can either browse items by People (which is similar to a folder system), or they can browse items by categories (which is a tag system).
2 sharing methods
Regarding our vision of collaboration, we came up with two methods for sharing, one that is internal to the FutureMoney app, and one that is external. Ashley and Tri will walk you through them in a bit.
unlock to access | unlock to share
After the conclusions we drew from the comparative analysis, and since trust was brought up by all the interviewees, we decided to lock the Vault feature as a security measure. Our user testing also confirmed that having a caution message and requiring verification for sharing externally increased the sense security and trust.
learnings
merging different solutions
One of the biggest challenges we tackled during this project was figuring out how to merge different ideas. We were torn between two solutions: searching for items by people versus searching through all items using tags and categories. After lots of discussion, we decided that both solutions were essential, and our challenge then became a matter of integrating these ideas to be intuitive for parents.
“how can you take ai further”
During a client feedback session, when we were asked how we could take AI further, we started to look into it more seriously. Unfortunately, due to time constraints we couldn't dive deep into AI. Looking back, it would have been really interesting to see what direction our team would take ai had it been a key focus.
