Home budget managing system
Client: Brigitte Sarfati, financial coucher
The app’s main goal was to give Brigitte’s particular budgeting system an easy interface to use.
Brigitte’s circle of clients grew and the need for coaching and monitoring her growing number of clients needed a simple system: a way her to give the main concepts of the budgeting ideology, provide an accessible overview of the budget for the user and also give her, as a coach, an effortless way of tracking every user, in order to coach each one then.
Another need was a system that allows her to track trends and patterns from all users to make her guidance more accurate.
In collaboration with Gal Nachum
Goals & Design
Main goal: Encourage smart spending by congratulating the users for using the system, and create a healthy practice of building budget.
The client wanted to guide the users to:
Stick to the budget – by making the flow of deciding on a budget easy, at the beginning of the month, and help the user to understand how much money he got left on the budget before actually spending it.
Tracking the budget during the month and keeping statistics on every month, to allow the user to track his spendings and make bigger-picture decisions.
To encourage the users to use the app every month, Brigitte created a scoring system: for every critical stage in the flow (budget building, goal achieving etc.) the user gets a certain amount of points. The points can be used for special offers: coupons for stores, special promotions etc.
The budget building area was divided into 3 sections: projected incomes, projected outcomes and savings, allowing the users to put money aside in three different saving “piggybanks”: the emergency savings, the “Gold” savings, and the debt savings.
In correlation with Brigitte’s philosophy, after building the budget at the beginning of the month, the budget is closed and cannot be changed anymore.
From that point on, the users are tracking and recording their incomes and expenditures, trying to meet the goals they set for themselves.
Brigitte’s business plan included 2 levels of users: basic users, that have access to some of the features, and premium users, that have access to all the features. One of the goals in the design of the app was to encourage users to join the premium plan.
As reminder and guidance, every part of the process is attached with a video of Brigitte’s advice on how to deal with every point of the flow.
In addition, the premium users have access to her blog, where she writes more about her philosophy and gives special tips for smart spending.
