Personal / Family Finance Mobile Applicaiton
Formative Research to design from Scratch for the Minimum Viable Product
Project Brief
About the Client: Famli is a proposed product by a Pune-based company Economizer Services Pvt Ltd. (ESPL), founded by people with a technical and economics background.
The goal was to build a fintech product centered around families which aids them in financial decision making and become the single source of truth for family financial information, accessible to family members and potentially external financial institutions.
Design Process Followed
1. Product Discovery
1.1. Research Goals
- Validate target customer segments.
- Assess user comfort levels in sharing sensitive financial information.
- Identify features users are willing to pay for.
- Understand current methods of managing family financial information.
- Investigate how wealth managers acquire and service clients
- Determine if asset entry requires verification.
1.2. Research Process
A) Preparation Phase: Understanding the domain, desk study, competitive landscape study, literature review of existing research and preparation of interview questionnaire.
B) Research Phase: 25 participants were interviewed. They were selected based on their Annual income and demography. The discussion revolved around the following enquiries
a) Their understanding about personal finance and financial habits
b) Their outlook on Digital Data security
C) Their inclination towards any particular asset types for investing
d) Their need and pain points with digitisation of financial data
e) Their thoughts about sharing the financial information with the family members
f) The current artefacts and apps people use for personal finance management
g) What are their expectations from the app we are trying to build
C) Analysis Phase: The interview findings were collected in a structured format for further analysis.
1.3. Research Outcome/Deliverables
1) Insights from interviews
2) Personas and psychographic analysis : We created 5 distinct behavioral personas of the HNI Indians
A) Visionary mavericks
B) Strategic Hustlers
C) Cautious Cosmopolitans
D) Backseat builders
E) Educated Aspirants
3) Opportunity areas and unmet needs were established for each of the above personas
4) Feature List catering to 2 target personas was finalised, because the expected first 1000 customers would probably from the
1.4. The Personas
Visionary Maverick
Entrepreneur at core – either running their own venture or having built and scaled multiple businesses.
Invests in places where others see risk, principle borrowed from running an enterprise.
Strategic Hustlers
Hardworking professionals with business backgrounds, dreaming and planning towards an alternative future in a business startup.
Investments are capital generators.
Cautious Cosmopolitans
Fast track HNIs who have rapidly climbed corporate ladder through hardwork and dedication.
Understand international markets but tied to Indian investments.
Backseat Builder
Wants to grow wealth but needs trusted hands to guide the way. High involvement of spouse, parents or in-laws in financial decisions.
Investments are tax-saving first.
Educated Aspirant
Humble professional believes in growing income and lifestyle through education and effort. Eager to learn new avenues to grow money but play it safe & slow.
Start in secure assets, upgrade slowly as they learn more.
2. Brand Design
We designed and delivered a comprehensive branding guideline document that serves as a reference for anyone working with the brand. It ensures consistency across all touchpoints like – App, website, Social media, business cards, stationary, letterheads, Employee ID cards, etc.
3. Feature Planning & MVP Definition Workshop
After the research report was submitted, a detailed workshop was conducted with the company stakeholders to prioritize the features to be built across 3 phases of the product development.
MVP Design and Iteration
4.1 Final Hi Fidelity Screens design for the MVP
Design of the MVP app in an agile fashion with continued collaboration with the client’s development team. This included wireframing, establishment of a design system and high-fidelity screens and clickable prototypes for stakeholder demonstrations.
4.2. AI Assistance
Conceptualization
The AI assistant was personified as a “Research Bussy” character which also serves as the brand mascot. This adds to the visibility, interactivity and engagement of the feature.
Interaction Guidelines
After research and iterations, following interaction guidelines were defined to increase the perceived credibility and engagement of the AI assistant:
- Ensure trust through upfront disclosure of capabilities and limitations of the chatbot.
- Implement dynamic delayed responses for a realistic interaction.
- Show task completion progress and allow users to terminate tasks at any stage.
- Enable users to make amendments within the chat interface.
- Provide optional visibility into the logic behind the provided information.
- Cite sources of information from within the application, e.g., table or project names.
AI Autonomy
- Buck provides autonomous recommendations to enhance user efficiency.
- Autonomously suggests actions based on user behaviors and preferences.
- Makes independent decisions to streamline user experiences.
4.3. Design System
We designed a complete Design system, comprising of all common UX patterns, to make the application consistent and make a matured Enterprise Application. Some examples of component specifications and visual style guide from the design system.
Bottom NavBar
Tabbing
Buttons
Rows
Inputs
Dropdown & Flyout Menu
Snack bars
Widgets
Cards
Theme Backgrounds
5. Summative Research
Summative research combined first-impression testing, feature evaluation, and a Discovery Game where users priced features, ranked their usefulness, and explained real-life scenarios of use. This helped reveal priorities, gaps, and expectations, along with concrete improvements and must-have additions needed for users to fully adopt the Famli app.
6. Design Handoff & UX Governance
- Continued handoff of design specs in agile fashion as feature by feature flows were developed
- Detailed audit of the build to suggest bugs and improvements
- Continued design support for feature enhancements and additions
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