Case study:A saving app solving financial literacy

Lois Saving app

About

Lois saving app is an application that is tailored to meet financial literacy in Nigeria. Lois saving app allows users to save a small amount of money as they earn or spend. You may be wondering what financial literacy means right?… smiles… I gat you.

Financial literacy is the ability to understand financial skills including personal, financial management, budgeting, and investing. Does that make sense? lol am sure it does

My Role

• Product designer
• User experience design
• Interaction design

My Design Process

Every good project starts with a good plan, I started with applying design thinking as a problem-solving method throughout the UX process, the five stages of the UX process are?

• Empathize
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test

Design thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the users and redefine problems to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be apparent to our initial level of understanding…

I hope you are following ….lol don't mind me I love to carry you along.

Thanks for getting to this point, I would love to work you through a detailed process I took while designing the Lois saving app using the five phases of the design process

The Empathy Phase

The empathy phase allowed me to see problems from people's perspectives and backgrounds, it is an important part of user experience that requires me to see things from my user's experience and thoughts. I started my research by reading articles. Of course, I must read to get more insights about Financial literacy and issues users face,

I sent out survey questions and I found out that potential users were frustrated and complained about poor saving habits, I also did a competitor analysis on the fintech industry already in existence to understand the existing pattern and flow. Some Fintech apps I checked were

• COWRY
• SUMOTRUST
• REPRINT
• dailyPIGGYVEST

I then moved to the interview stage where I sent out screeners to know my target market. As a product designer balancing business goals and users' need is the ultimate …You may be wondering who my target market is. My target market is anyone who earns money and wants to save for a rainy day, I interviewed both unemployed, and self-employed freelancers, and I asked there experience with other saving apps, asked about issues they face, and how they think it can be improved

Research insights

I picked this information from the intending users

• Age bracket between 18–50 years of age
• Users are African(Nigerian males and females
• Potential users find it difficult to save and track finances
• 80% of the users were self-employed and received salaries daily
• 66% had little to no knowledge of financial literacy
• 70% of users needed an application where they can save money at ease
• Users needed a friendly application where they could navigate easily
• On a scale of 0–5 users had a financial literacy level of 3 out of 5

After understanding my research insights I quickly moved to the defined stage

Define stage

Get hydrated and come back, we got to the interesting part

In this phase, I already understood the user's need, analyzed the research insights and observations and I was ready to start generating ideas. I invested a lot of thinking and brainstorming, I did not just want any saving app, I wanted something with a twist, then I came up with the idea of allowing users to save while they spend or earn, Does this make sense? You would understand that in a bit. Moving on I made paper sketches and a few iterations. Trust me there was a lot of back and front, as we all know the design thinking process is not linear. Some ideas I generated from the back and forth were

• I learned most users save either on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, therefore I made sure to add a feature that allows users to save while spending or earning, this way financial goals would be met better, and a percentage of how much you earn or spend would be saved without even noticing and you can easily fall back to it on rainy days
• I also added the option of selecting an amount to be safely locked, we want users to be in full control of their finances easily
• I integrated a portfolio showing them their saving progress and spending
• I added an option allowing users to speak to a finance officer on better ways to be in control of their finances
• I added a blog feature where users can read up on what financial literacy means to be 100% in control of their finances

That leads us to the project goal…

I must commend you for getting to this point thank you very much

Project Goal

The goal of the Lois saving app is basically to give you full control of your finances easily (Financial literacy)

Lois saving app allows users to save a certain percentage of what they earn or spend. Let me break it down for you, If I spend the sum of 30,000 Naira buying Foodstuff, the app automatically saves 10% of what I spent which is 3000… of course, users can choose the percentage they want app to save for them…. Shey, you grab lol …don't mind me

Next, I started creating Lo-fi wireframes which I later turned into hi-fidelity wireframes

Splash screen

The splash screen carried the name of the app with a padlock symbol trying to tell users the app was secured.. moving to the onboarding screens, I made the onboarding process intuitive as it educated the users about what the app was about

I made sure to put affordance and signifiers to help the overall user process. For every step in the design process, I made sure to consider some crucial features which include

• Security

Security is the main priority of most fintech apps as they manage the most sensitive customer data, I made sure to add a feature of face id or thumbprint, and I also made sure to verify the email or phone number used to register

Prototype

This is an experimental phase aimed at identifying the best possible solution for each of the problems identified during the above stages, I had a better idea of how the app would look, I designed for the light theme, but I would be designing a darker theme for better accessibility.

Before designing, I created a design system that aids consistency throughout my design, I chose sea green luck which gives you the acknowledgment for everyday things you do because it's a non-threatening color that seems to be conservative and represents luck and gives you. For fonts, I used SF PRO

Onboarding and Splash Screens

After creating my design system, I started designing, I started with designing the splash screen and intuitive onboarding screens that would tell new users about the application

I then went on to design the create account screens and the home page which showed the security of the application. I achieved this by verifying the email account or phone number used to register.

Home screen

Other screens

Test

It was time to test my prototype, so I can identify

• Potential confusion in navigation
• Gather more insights about the layout
• Learn more about Financial literacy and make the iteration of the product better

Designing user interfaces for the fintech industry is an exciting challenge, it makes me know the problems the users face clearly and makes me curious about ways to solve them

The next step for me is to

• Test my prototype with users, iterate my design, and possibly make an update to this case study
• Broaden my knowledge of financial literacy so I can solve problems better

Dear reader thank you very much for getting to this point.

Got critics for me?

Please do well to drop a comment. I would be glad to take them into consideration as it makes me a better Designer.

To get the full Figma link kindly reach out me

Want a custom design? Reach out to me on daganalois677@gmail.com

You may like to check my personal website http://lois-dagana.netlify.app

You could reach me on Behance at https://www.behance.net/b3a78fad

My phone number is. 08082280963