In mid 2019, my friend had a budgeting idea that started in an Excel spreadsheet.
He said that his friends felt overwhelmed by their personal finances and spending. We recruited 20 people to test out the budget solution in a spreadsheet. They loved it and said they found clarity and security in their daily spending.
I saw him present at a start up competition and I couldn't help but imagine that clunky spreadsheet turned into a beautiful app that easily helped people track their money. Fast forward a few months, I recruited a developer to help us and we were designing and building an iOS native app.
This was my first time designing a native iOS app and I had a lot to learn.
I focused on improving my understanding of mobile interaction patterns and built on my existing expertise in information architecture and workflows to ensure that we created an experience that was easy and intuitive for users.
I worked closely with our developer to make sure that our user experience logic matched well with the database and that user interface elements were designed to match with the iOS pattern library.
After designing logic flows and wireframes, we jumped into high fidelity prototypes and conducted usability testing. After 6 months of development, in summer 2020, the app was launched to the app store with 200 beta users.
Our initial wireframes design was really distinct from the developed flow after usability testing feedback.
We originally conceived that the user would set up their budget after signup and before seeing the dashboard. Through testing, we learned that it was confusing and time consuming to fill out the budget details at the upfront sign up on the app.
We removed it from the flow and instead landed the user on the empty-state dashboard after sign up. Then, we had a section on the dashboard that helped them though the budget creation process. This provided the user with more instant gratification with getting into the app and learning how it works as an entire process. We used progressive disclosure to improve the budgeting workflow.
You can see some of the screens below. Unfortunately, I no longer have access to our design files because I left the startup team. I'm proud that the Daily Spend has continued to evolve as an app and budgeting resource.
With the release of dark mode on iOS last year, we wanted to make sure our app was compatible.
