Financial Wellness App

Customer research

The prompt was quite open-ended given “financial wellness” can mean many things. We conducted in-depth qualitative and quantitative research to answer a few key questions:

• What are the biggest challenges for people when it comes to managing their money?

• What tools do they currently use, and where do they fall short?

• What new tools would make financial management easier for them?

At the heart of our research was our desire to uncover not only functional, but also emotional and social needs. Some example findings are included below:

• Managing finances can be overwhelming, and many people are afraid to start because it gives them anxiety. Most existing financial tools feel impersonal and only look at the numbers.

• Most people create their own spreadsheets or track their finances in their heads.

• It’s hard to turn managing finances into a consistent habit.

Prototyping

Leveraging the learnings from customer research, we rapidly developed low-fidelity prototypes to test with users. The product concepts also took into account the value that the client could uniquely provide based on their existing business lines. The winning value proposition was a friendly financial wellness app that helps users create good money habits and make financial progress that feels good.

Leveraging behavioral science

We collaborated with behavioral scientists to incorporate the right cues throughout the experience, thus helping customers take small, consistent actions, stay motivated, and feel rewarded for their progress. Challenges were a central construct to the experience.

Building the MVP

Once we had solidified the product concept, we quickly built an MVP to take into the market and start gathering customer feedback. The MVP helped users monitor their finances, offered them challenges to help take small, consistent financial actions, and provided financial tips and access to products that made sense for them (e.g., pet insurance, digital living wills). A unique aspect to the product we eventually named “Upwise” was the concept of “money mood”, i.e., an emotional tracker that looks at how customers are feeling throughout their financial journies beyond the numbers.