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Product Design

Barclays Omen

A budgeting app designed to predict your future transactions and provide a personalized plan for a greater chance of financial success.

Team Project

Margaret Panoti
Maryam Khan
Din Terpuni

Duration

3 months

My Role

UX Research, UI Design, Prototyping, Animation

Summary

Design Opportunity

Develop a new digital tool that bridges the gap between money and mental health, and provides vulnerable consumers with mental health issues a better way to manage their money.

Design Challenge

In the UK, 15 million people make impulsive purchases every week. These purchases result in temporary satisfaction, which negatively impacts mental health.

How can we alleviate the mental health issues caused from irrational spendings to help Barclays’ users manage their money better?

MAIN FEATURES

Solution

A budgeting app that uses data driven algorithms to predict your spending habits based on your past transactions, providing you with a personalized financial plan.

  • Divide user's income into personalized categories based on their past transaction to help them visualize their spendings before they happen.
  • Use home assistants to set a daily budget.
  • Visualize spending trends in easy to understand graphs.
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Process Highlights

Empathy Interviews

We began our user research by conducting empathy interviews throughout New York City.
From our interviews we found out that money and mental health were an interconnected issue for anyone who had responsibilities and people that depended on them.

We used donuts to lure people into taking a few minutes to talk with us in a cold winter day.
"
Parents
We want to bring our kids to America to get the best education, and that costs a lot of money so it is really stressful.”
"
Young Adults
I tend to spend more when I get stressed, but then I end up getting even more stressed cuz I just spend money I shouldn’t have."
"
Elderly
We want to live comfortably when we retire, so we need a plan to achieve our retirement goal.”

Affinity Mapping

We took the data from the empathy interviews and organized them into overlapping categories to discover essential user needs in both money management and mental health.

Affinity Map Findings
  • People spend more money when they are stressed.
  • Visualizing money going away, like using cash, makes you spend less.
  • People wish to see more specific categories of where their money goes.
Getting sticky note wasted on a Friday night.

Personas

When developing the personas we focused on keeping a wide variety of users in our mind as mental health and money management affect all age and income groups.

MATTHEW ROBERTS, 25

Middle class working professional, married with no kids, still paying off his college debt.

NEEDS

A detailed and specific breakdown to where the money spent goes.

FEI HONG, 40

Immigrant mother who is saving for her sons college tuition.

NEEDS

Method to resist emotional and irrational spendings.

Enrique Ruiz, 55

Working class man in the verge of retirement.

NEEDS

A personalized financial plan to reach financial (retirement) goals.

Journey mapping

User Insight

Most people struggled with irrational spendings, otherwise known as retail therapy. Irrational spendings are often made in the pursuit of instant gratification, but they leave the user with nothing more than temporary satisfaction and heightened stress regarding their bank account.

"
As human beings we confuse needs and wants.”

Problem

How can we alleviate the mental health issues caused from irrational spendings to help Barclays’ users manage their money better?

Insight

Visualizing the financial damage irrational spendings cause before it even happens, would help people be less inclined to fall prey to retail therapy.

Ideation

Solution

A budgeting app that uses data driven algorithms to predict your spending habits and help you stay on track with your goals for a greater chance of financial success.

Sitemap
task flow
Features

Omen'S Plan

Use AI algorithms and data gathered from past transactions predict the user’s spending habits for the month and separate their income into personalized categories.

Homepage

Omen will ration the user’s income across different categories with suggested money amounts based on user’s past transaction data and current budget.

Omen's Plan

This represents the amount of money that is left over after the income has been separated into categories by Omen.

Homepage
Omen's plan

Edit Categories

The user can edit categories aa well as the amount of money assigned to each category according to their needs.

Adding Categories

Upon adding a category the user can name it and assign to it an amount of money from the left over budget in the plan.

Adding Money

When editing the amount of money in a category, a graph that represents the spending habits of the particular category will pop up, to help users make educated decisions.

Add category
Add money

Daily Budget

Setting a daily budget at the beginning of each day can help users avoid irrational spendings.

Tracker

Allows the user to visualize how much they spent that day in comparison to the daily budget.

Home Assistant

Omen allows for integration with home assistants so that users can set a daily budget without interrupting their morning routine.

Daily Budet

Spending Trends

Users can view their financial progress with Omen’s Plan through simplified data graphs..

Overall Graph

Simplified graph for spending trends throughout categories.

Spending by category

Simplified graph for spending trends over time in each category.

Spending Trends
3

Daily Budget

Set a daily budget with your home assistant in the morning to help you stay on track with Omen’s plan.

Tracker

See how much you spent that day in comparison to the daily budget.

History

View prior daily budgets for future references.

Daily budget

Budget of the day.

Home Assistant

Use your home assistant to set a daily budget without interrupting your morning routine.

Design System

Design Direction

The softness of neumorphic design help user calm down while interracting with the app and helps lower the stress that’s associtated with looking at bank apps.

Takeaways

What I learned

  • Conduct extensive user research and using design thinking methodology to develop a user-centric experience.
  • Conduct effective empathy interviews using the 5 WHY’s approach.
  • Integrating new technological trends into the design thinking process.

Future improvements

  • Integrate these features in the existing Barclays app.
  • Conduct AB testing on prototype.
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