I interviewed three married couples and talked about their experiences with conversations about money and gathered insights about management styles. I have reached the peak of the project and biggest challenge yet. How do I ask people to talk to me about their finances? How do I conduct an app usability test with their Mint account? I want to respect their privacy but I need this information. To tackle these problems, I decided to be completely transparent and open with my personal Mint account. This gave me the ability to observe their interaction with the app. And make sure that they were comfortable the entire time.
With interviews conducted, couples identified their familiarity with Mint but it was falling short in areas. This lead me to develop Mint To Be: a Mint app extension that includes features such as goal savings, optimum customization and above all else, created for two people. These are the three MVP’s I focused on for the development and testing phase.
I started with sketches on how the user experience could be improved and presented those concepts in an A/B testing form. Working at a lower fidelity, I was able to rapidly and iteratively work out the exact steps and information user’s need when trying to accomplish user tasks.
I utilized Mint’s branding and style within the design while still exercising creative freedom, keeping hierarchy and colors the same but altering the navigation and experience.
Here, the two users are able to see their individual finances and combined. This feature is versatile, regardless of what the dynamics of money management within the relationship may be.
To link accounts, the user has the ability to add an account and configure its settings for whether they want to share the balance or activity of this account with their partner.
Taking the user out of the app and into the institutions site leads to optimum security too. Mint only has read access to ensure that your information is safe and secure.
Now, only 1 in 5 people are satisfied with their financial condition. Not just what their salary is, but how much debt they’ve accrued, what and how much they’ve invested, and the standing of their savings and retirement accounts. When asked if they could come up with $1000 for an unexpected bill or emergency, their rainy-day funds are close to empty. This is a problem across households with varying yearly incomes.
Creating goals is a great way to invest and put aside money for what matters, whether big or small, a first home deposit or that rainy day fund. I incorporated a goals feature to work on the mobile application so the users could make individual or joint goals, contribute to them together and see their money grow.
And finally, one of the most sought after experiences user’s wanted from Mint, was the ability to customize what financial features they wanted to use. This experience, as rewarding as it sounds, is the simplest in form though it took a deep analysis of the app’s information architecture to do so. During card sorting exercises, every person had a different way of laying out what features were most important to them.
