Designed the MVP of a budgeting web app to help young adults manage their finances with ease.
Many young adults navigating their personal finances want to be smart with their spending but find budgeting overwhelming. Spendly simplifies the process with a seamless setup, automatic transaction tracking, and an intuitive way to categorise expenses.
UI/UX Design
Personal Project
Software Engineer
Product Manager
TL;DR
It requires sifting through transactions, setting rigid spending limits, and manually tracking expenses—making it easy to give up. Users want a quick setup, automated expense tracking, and a simple, visual breakdown of their income, expenses and remaining budget to stay on top of their finances.
Ready for some light reading?
I interviewe our target audience to understand why budgeting feels overwhelming, often leading them to avoid it despite their goal of saving and making smarter financial decisions. Here are the key findings.
“I know I need to budget, but I don’t want to spend hours tracking every single purchase”
“I just want something that gives me a clear view of my spending and nudges me when I’m going overboard”
Effortless steup
Setup is often too confusing. Many users to drop off before completion.
Automatic expense tracking
Tracking and categorising spending should be effortless and require minimal manual input.
Clear budget overview
Users want a simple, visual breakdown of income, expenses, and remaining budget.
Using , we quickly brainstormed feature ideas to meet user needs, defined the MVP scope, prioritised key features, and planned future iterations whilst considering technical and time constraints.
TL;DR
The goal was to launch the MVP quickly to start truly learning from real users. I constantly checked in with the developer to ensure technical feasibility. With the limited time, I designed using a balance of user insights and informed assumptions.
User flow mapping
Low-fidelity
High-fidelity
Development review
Second iteration
Prototyping
User testing
Third and final iteration
One of the most important flows was onboarding, as we learned this can be a major drop-off point. I mapped it out to evaluate and refine the experience, focusing on keeping steps minimal and automating where possible—like suggesting spending categories based on past transactions. Flexibility was also key, allowing users to choose the path that best suited their situation or preference.
I jumped straight into Figma to create low-fi wireframes, exploring layout and navigation options and ideating designs for core features. Throughout the process, I kept the user's pain points front and center, ensuring every design decision worked toward solving their biggest challenges.
From the low-fi wireframes, I worked with the developer to decide on the best design choices—balancing what made the most sense for users and what was technically feasible. I then refined these into high-fidelity designs, gradually building reusable components and shaping the app’s design system.
I walked the team through the proposed designs and user flows to gather feedback on improving the user experience and catching anything I might’ve missed. We discussed potential challenges with scalability, refined interactions, and made small adjustments to streamline development. The goal was to strike the right balance between a great user experience and an efficient development process.
I made minor design tweaks based on feedback from the critique session. Below are some key points discussed.
It was time to build an interactive prototype for the main user flows. I outlined key tasks for user testing and created clickable prototypes to give users a realistic feel of the app.
I recruited five users who closely matched our target audience for a moderated usability test. They were given tasks to complete using the Figma prototype while thinking aloud, to help me understand their thought process. Below are the key findings.
4/5
users found the overall onboarding process clear and easy to set up.
2/5
wanted the ability to sort their transactions to make reviewing expenses easier.
3/5
users felt uneasy about sharing their bank details without first knowing what data would be accessed.
While additional testing and iteration cycles would have been valuable, time constraints meant prioritising development to launch quickly. We accepted the risk of mistakes, to focus on releasing early and gathering feedback from real users.
Now, it's time to bring Spendly to life. I'll jumping straight to development—a process I love because I get to see the app transform from designs into a real, working product (no shade, Figma). Stay tuned for the next phase.
Thank you for reading this case study. If you have any more questions, please feel free to get in touch and I would be more than happy to chat with you in more depth.
