Building a Foundation for Forming Impactful Financial Habits

A lightweight and fun way to improve an individual's financial habits through a viral and newsworthy product.

Role
Lead experience designer

Scope
Native iOS app

Cinch wanted to continue to build user excitement and intrigue in preparation for the launch of their core product, the Cinch Advisor app.

Making the right financial decisions can be difficult. Cinch’s goal is to be a fiduciary financial advisor in your pocket by positioning themselves as thought leaders in the space but for users choosing the right financial app in an oversaturated market can be overwhelming.

Experience Strategy

The experience is designed to engage users in participatory weekly challenges.  

These challenges inspire to educate users on creative savings opportunities submitted by experts and the Cinch community.

The big picture

While using the Trainer App, users focus on making small, everyday spending changes. These changes add up over time and build the foundation for making more impactful financial changes in the Advisor App.

The Trainer App is an essential step the user takes before graduating to the Advisor App.

Learn

Learn from one another’s experiences while teaching users financial literacy

Users can privately and candidly discuss opportunities within the Cinch community. The entire Cinch community is partaking in the same weekly challenge while still being able to learn from past challenges.

The Trainer App highlights the educational component of Cinch, educating the user on the behavioral economic principles behind each challenge. Even though the app is designed to be a fun experience, there are logical, scientific drivers behind it.     

Contribute

Empowering financial awareness by contributing to the conversation

Keeping the conversation focused on one challenge per week allows for users to feel a sense of community, to educate themselves in new ways, and contribute to an international financial event.  

Mindful Money Moments

The trainer app is about forming healthy spending habits. By requiring the user to rate their mindful money moment through a fun yet abstract rating system, they are able to express excitement about a savings opportunity.

Creating Personalized Posts & Sharing with the community

Allowing the user to create a custom post makes the act of posting more enjoyable and entertaining. The overall playfulness of the posting experience makes a stressful subject less intimidating while engaging other users within the challenge feed.

After the user has created a personalized post, they have the option to share it with the Cinch community, with friends, or add it to their personal journal. There is also an option to share outside the app.

Change

Empowering personal change in every user

During a users mindful moment, it is also possible to quantify how much they have saved. Similar to Venmo, users have the option to add as much or as little detail as they’d like.

At the end of each weekly challenge, users receive an email with featured posts. 

The Process

To develop this concept we underwent a two-week design sprint. 

Throughout this time, we refined the ask, developed a strategy, and created representative wireframes and mockups. These helped convey our solution for users to learn and practice financial strategies.

Understand & define the problem through research

We looked into various apps for inspiration on everything from challenges to habit formation and researched further into design strategies for lifestyle behavior change.

Abstract & Reflective. Use data abstraction to display information to encourage the user to reflect and understand how their behaviors relate to the larger goal.

Unobtrusive. Present and collect data in an unobtrusive manner, and make it available when and where the user needs it. 

Public. Present and collect the data such that the user is comfortable in the event that others may become  aware of it. 

Aesthetic. The visual aspects of the technology must be comfortable and attractive to support the user’s personal style.

Key takeaways from app demos

User Personas

Diverge & generate ideas

How might we…

These are short questions that launch brainstorms. Through this exercise, we were able to identify and prioritize different aspects of the app. We determined the most important things to focus on were tone within content, motivation, and cadence.

Crazy eights

In this fast-paced exercise, participants spend 40 seconds on small sketches, allowing for quick ideation. Our goal was to identify spending triggers. We wanted to understand what users’ guilty pleasures were. Popular triggers included clothing, temperature, mood, gifting, transportation, eating out, FOMO, data usage, entertainment, idle time, inbox, and travel.

Storyboards

We then jumped into Storyboards, which allow participants to fully develop ideas and dive into the details of an interaction.

For this round of Storyboards, we explored how the Trainer App would handle various spending triggers. We were especially interested in time of day prompts being that cadence was a big theme of the sprint.

Concept Validation

After voting and narrowing ideas down to an agreed ‘golden path’, we began creating a rapid prototype in preparation for concept testing with our core user base.

Concept testing validated that people ultimately want the Cinch Trainer App. We learned that our main user base would primarily consist of users who may already be budgeting themselves or understand the importance of healthy spending and saving habits.

Concept Testing Conclusions:

• People want to explore the app and understand its benefits before inviting friends to engage in a weekly challenge with them.

• We could ask people to estimate savings but this metric should not be public.

• People want to check off that they have completed a challenge but it seemed burdensome to have to actively join a challenge before contributing.

Involvement

As the lead experience designer, I oversaw the visual and interaction design of the Cinch Trainer app from the concept stage to prototyping and user testing – including workshop facilitation and daily communication with product stakeholders.

• Design sprint facilitation

• Workflows + product mapping

• Wireframing