Project Brief

Designing for better financial literacy

OnePay is a personal finance app that stays current with your financial spendings, stacks your money habits stack against official money spending standards, and shows you how much you can set aside to reach your financial goals.


This project is done in collaboration with my business partner who is a financial advisor at Scotiabank. OnePay is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or built on any material belonging to Scotiabank.

Scope

End-to-end product design, 0 to 1

Product development into MVP

9-step financial intake user flow

Spending capture mechanisms

Functional display of goals, projections, and health score

Report generation ready for professional advisors

Design system

Marketing landing page

My Role

Product design lead. I own the product end-end. Flows, screens, feature implementation, visual design, and design system.

My Partner's Role

Financial advisor at Scotiabank. He owns the financial models, calculation of benchmarks, regulatory boundaries, and useful user intakes.

Background

More money is not the answer to money problems. The answer is better money habits.

I always thought making more money is the answer to reaching a prosperous life. My business partner (financial advisor) had a different philosophy. He told me about a common trend he noticed in his clients that many high income individuals were in worst financial shape than mid income clients who simply planned better. This became the foundation of why we set out to make this app because we realized we can help people simply with better financial literacy. Reaching financial and lifestyle goals could be achieved much faster with better money habits instead of trying to earn more.

Quote from financial advisor

"You would be surprised how many rich people are in worst financial shape than mid income families. Its all about spending habits, not income."

OnePay Iconography

The core tension

Every financial plan starts with a static form that doesn't evolve into a habit

As the first step of planning, clients are often asked to fill out a paper form that reconstructs years of financial life such as income, assets, dept, sendings, goals, all sorted into a form with ~1000 fillable fields across categories like Housing, Transportation, Childcare, Personal Grooming, Savings & Investments, etc.


Clients can take day to weeks to complete this form. And once done, the results are a single event on a piece of paper filled out once and never looked at again. Advisors watch clients drift back to old habits within months of meeting them. The form does not stick into a habit.

As the first step of planning, clients are often asked to fill out a paper form that reconstructs years of financial life such as income, assets, dept, sendings, goals, all sorted into a form with ~1000 fillable fields across categories like Housing, Transportation, Childcare, Personal Grooming, Savings & Investments, etc.


Clients can take day to weeks to complete this form. And once done, the results are a single event on a piece of paper filled out once and never looked at again. Advisors watch clients drift back to old habits within months of meeting them. The form does not stick into a habit.

Objectives for OnePay

1

A financial tracking system that fall is line with the financial advisor form.

2

Making sure the tracking statistics evolve based on day to day habits, not just a one time capture like a form.

3

Putting 1 & 2 together to help users form habits that improve their financial health.

"Behaviour doesn't change at one moment. It changes with a subtle nudge at the moment of action"

Traditional financial planning intake form

Traditional financial planning intake form vs OnePay intake flow

OnePay’s financial planning intake

What I worked from

A combination of advisory insights and tools, user research, competitor analysis.

A working financial advisory practice

A working professional in the field that has helped identified the core project issue and how we can design a solution within regulations and guidelines.

Real benchmarks and financial advisory tools

Real financial benchmarks and categories according to Canadian regulatory guidelines and CFP practitioner standards to do OnePay’s calculations.

Competitive analysis of top budget apps.

Deep teardown of top budget apps: Buddy, Simple Budget, and Fleur. Mapping out their core flows to find how they shaped their products. And identifying weaknesses we can tackle with OnePay.

Key Decision 1

Measuring against national standards rather than made up categories.

Competitor apps (Buddy, Simple Budget, and Fleur) all ask users to set budgets per sending category up front before using the app. They assume the user already knows how much they should spend, which is precisely the knowledge the user probably doesn’t have.


All competitor apps used their own categorizations for expenses, finances etc. As a result, each had their own dedicated metric system which was only useful within their own app.


For OnePay, we decided to use national standards for categorizations so we can use benchmarks based on real statistics and create useful reports that can be used by any financial advisor outside of the app.

Competitor apps (Buddy, Simple Budget, and Fleur) all ask users to set budgets per sending category up front before using the app. They assume the user already knows how much they should spend, which is precisely the knowledge the user probably doesn't have.


All competitor apps used their own categorizations for expenses, finances etc. As a result, each had their own dedicated metric system which was only useful within their own app.

Why OnePay uses national standards

A

Users can get real spending thresholds based on national statistics based on their income and financial standings.

B

Creating financial standing reports that are compatible to be handed off to real financial advisors for further work.

Dashboard for adding expenses and comparing them to standard spending models

Benchmarks based on real categories used by Canadian regulatory guidelines and CFP practitioner standards

Benchmarks based on real categories used by Canadian regulatory guidelines and CFP practitioner standards

Key Decision 2

Setting goals and doing the calculations that lead to actually achieving them

Its easy for someone to say what they want. A house, a car, a wedding, a degree. But rarely do people actually calculate what it takes to achieve these goals through monthly contributions. OnePay gives users the tool to set goals with timelines to see how much monthly contribution is needed to get there.

Solution

Lets users set goals and see how they can get there with monthly contributions.

OnePay gives users 3 simple numbers
1. What the goal requires each month.

  1. What the user’s income-spending balance leaves available for the goal.

  2. The distance between 1 & 2

Goals dashboard with 2 goals set

Key Decision 3

Making reporting expenses easy to do during the act of spending.

Advisors see clients fill the report and forget about its results a few weeks after creating a plan. The results of the report simply live in a static sheet that gets outdated quickly and doesn’t turn into a habit.


We knew the key to making OnePay’s reports up to date and useful was to make an easy way to capture expenses the moment the expense is happening.

3 methods of adding expenses

1. Picture of receipts

  1. Typing or speaking into chat interphase

  2. Manual

  3. Bank statement upload

Method 1: Picture of receipt for OnePay to analyze and auto categorize

Method 2: Describing expense in chat box for auto categorizing

Method 3: Manually adding expenses

Where I failed and what I would do differently

Initially, I designed the app to connect directly to apple's wallet app to track expenses. The idea was based on the app only visually keeping track of spendings and auto categorizing them as the user spends during day to day living.


After spending time designing around this mechanism, we discovered the app store's guidelines are tight and access to apple's IOS wallet app would be nearly impossible. We had to quickly rethink how to change our app to fit this constraint.


I came up with the 2 new methods mentioned above; taking pictures of receipts or describing the expense in natural language to a chat interphase for the app to analyze. Although these are less than perfect solutions, they are the best we could think of based on our constraints. Moving forward, I would better research feasibility of features before designing around it.

Annotated handoff. Search results at 15″ and 13″, with max-widths, sticky behaviour, and card constraints documented in the file.

“On a constrained product, verifying the constraint is the first design task, not a validation step at the end."

Where the app ends

Designing an ending, not a funnel

As stated in the case study and multiple times inside our app, OnePay is not meant to give financial advise and is not meant to fully replace financial managers. Its designed to give users financial literacy and guide them to better overall financial health and habits.


The app ends its function here and gives users all the tools they need to meet a professional financial advisor and take their finances to the next level. OnePay delivers the report needed as the first step to financial management, and gives you rough guidelines to follow and stay on top of financial plans.

Where the app ends

OnePay helps users learn better financial habits and nudge themselves towards better financial management. They will have all the tools they need to meet a professional advisor and take finances to the next level.