Mintmate
Role
Tools
Team
Time frame
Mintmate is a comprehensive finance app designed to bring all bank accounts, savings, and credit cards together in one place. By offering easy access to all financial information, Mintmate helps users gain the clarity needed to manage their money more effectively.
As a user of financial apps myself, I have noticed the difficulty in keeping track of finances effectively when accounts or funds are spread into different banks, credit cards, and savings accounts. These are only visible from their own individual apps.
During my research I discovered that a lot of people, like me, have difficulty in keeping track of their spending. An app that consolidates all accounts would be a helpful tool for managing finances.
All accounts are consolidated, and transactions are categorised.
Mintmate offers an easy payment feature to quickly send money to contacts.
Achieve your savings targets by setting goals for future plans.
I began by identifying problems and brainstorming solutions.
💡‘Okay, so now I understand that users struggle to manage their financial health due to scattered accounts, which makes it difficult to track spending and planning for the future.’
I then examined competitor apps to help me take a good look at the future marketplace.
💡‘So, my future app could take advantage of a number of opportunities such as not only providing personal finance management by combining all the users’ accounts in one place, but it could also be used for online and offline payments, and to offer financial education.’
The Business Requirement Document (BRD) compiles all the business goals, customer needs and stakeholders concerns. This document was helpful in keeping the focus on what needs to be accomplished, rather than how to accomplish it. Here are some excerpts:
💡‘This exercise was really helpful in understanding how a team would be involved in the project, and at which stage, guiding decision-making and clarifying expectations, amongst other objectives.’
The information compiled in the BRD was then translated into stories - small sentences that describe individual actions a user can take while using the app:
As a [role], I want to [action], so that [desired outcome].
💡Writing user stories was helpful in shedding light into how each of the main features would be used by customers, and their expectations.
After identifying my research goals and creating a script, I selected interviewees who have used financial apps in the past and are familiar with how they work.
With the data from research and user interviews in hand, I then conducted an affinity map exercise to analyse and to find the needs, pain points and barriers to adoption. This information allowed me to extract true insights from the interviews.
These insights reinforce the importance of a comprehensive, user-centric app with convenient payment capabilities, and real-time budgeting features.
Based on the research findings, I then created portrayals of the target user for Mintmate in the form of two user personas. One of my target audiences is a professional group of users, with an average age of 30 - 40, on a very busy schedule, with familiarity with mobile devices and, in particular, with financial apps.
After reviewing the user journeys and personas it was the time to think about the Information Architecture (IA) in the form of a sitemap. The app’s features were divided into four main categories. I then conducted unmoderated closed card sorting to help evaluate the AI and refine the sitemap.
💡As expected, there was some confusion when participants tried to assign categories in the card sorting exercise. I believe that much of which was caused by the lack of context or more information about the app. Nonetheless it was a useful exercise, and some of the features and categories were renamed or simplified as a result, helping me to create a more logical and user-friendly organisation for the app.
I produced mobile and desktop wireframes for 3 of the app’s core features to communicate how each of these features will function.
The colour palette chosen for the app has light and dark shades of blue. As a personal financial app, the intention was to evoke feelings of security, serenity and trustworthiness and these are qualities associated with the blue colour.
I built a catalogue of elements such as colours, typography styles, icons, grid systems, etc. This provided me with a set of design guidelines that helped maintain consistency in the design.
I conducted usability tests with 6 participants, putting the prototype to the test to observe how users navigate the app to complete tasks.
Home Screen does not look like a home screen
Users confuse ‘Transactions’ and ‘Payments’ options
Payment schedule options are not clear
The onboarding is simple, quick and clear
It is great to be able to schedule a payment date
Seeing the remaining balance after payment is a great feature
Users expect to see the most important information about their finances on the first screen - their bank balance.
The text needs to be made clearer, such as changing ‘transactions’ to ‘View transactions’ so that the ‘payments’ feature can be understood for what it is, payments to someone or a company.
The schedule-a-payment text ‘Send now’ in blue' confused many of the participants. It was changed from ‘Payment options’ to ‘Schedule payment’ and an arrow was added to clearly show that options needed to be selected before proceeding to the actual CTA button at the bottom of the screen.
The Stark plugin for Figma was used to identify accessibility issues in the MintMate app prototype. The main areas for improvement, aimed at achieving AA compliance, are contrast, typography, touch targets, and vision simulation. This test helped me better understand the importance of accessibility in design and how industry guidelines can be applied to ensure that the app is usable for a wide range of users, including those with disabilities.
This project was my first in-depth exploration of UX design, giving me hands-on experience in user-focused design. I learned the importance of centring the user in every step of the process.
Conducting user interviews taught me how to gather and interpret feedback more effectively, helping me to connect more closely with user needs. This approach proved invaluable for simplifying navigation, which I found can dramatically improve user experience.
I also gained practical skills in Figma, creating intelligent components for faster, more efficient iterations.
Overall, this experience refined my approach to UX design, grounding it in empathy and practical, user-focused solutions.