Flexible Budgets

BACKGROUND

The Monthly Budget was one of HelloWallet’s most popular features. However, while members really liked the ability to customize their budget categories and track their spending, they also found the month-long timeline too restricting.

PRODUCT GOALS

To design a more personalized budgeting experience that better aligned with our members’ lifestyles and financial goals. The main objective of Flexible Budgets was to allow users to create customized budgets that they can easily track, either along with the Monthly Budget or on its own.

Discovery

After combing through support tickets, conducting a series of member interviews, and researching our members’ spending habits, we discovered a common theme: people wanted more flexibility when it comes to budgeting and many found the existing Monthly Budget limiting. I compiled all the insights gleaned about our members to create a mental model to help guide conversations with the Product Team. I also created an experience roadmap for a new budgeting experience that went from product conception to integration with other features in HelloWallet. I then worked with the Product Owner to break down the roadmap into high-level user stories which could be tackled in two-week sprints.

Execution

We decided to launch Flexible Budgets on our mobile applications (iOS and Android) first before extending to the web experience. I designed Flexible Budgets in two-weeks sprints, working collaboratively with a cross-functional team consisting of a UI Designer, iOS and Android Developers, and a QC Engineer. We used Usertesting.com to conduct testing along the way to  suss out and address usability issues before product launch.

Outcomes

We launched Flexible Budgets in the summer of 2016 - you can read all about it in this blog post I wrote.

At the time of launch, HelloWallet was owned by Morningstar. We used Flexible Budgets as a case study to show the rest of the organization the importance of a design-lead culture as well as constant, cross-collaboration with engineers and product teams. We demoed the functionality regularly to different parts of the organization over the next few months, including the monthly showcase, “Building Software Users Love.” Flexible Budgets was also used as a launchpad for Budgets 2.0, which was our new, web-based budgeting capability.

in retrospect

There are a few things that stand out to me when I look back on Flexible Budgets:

• Run just enough research: Explore existing means of client feedback and insight when you do not have enough time or resources to run full-fledged research during the Discovery phase.

• Make space to collaborate: Dedicated collaboration doesn’t just help teams get to decisions faster, but also keeps up momentum during times of uncertainty.

• Advocate for holistic experiences: The Product team was planning on creating a completely different budgeting experience in our Web application after we rolled-out Flexible Budgets. I knew this would result in a disjointed experience across platforms for our users, so I built out a business case that outlined how Flexible Budgets could serve as a launchpad for a more robust budgeting feature on web. This approach was ultimately adopted.

• Don’t pivot without looking back: After we rolled out Flexible Budgets, we immediately pivoted to the next set of capabilities on mobile. In retrospect, I wish I pushed for more feedback and iteration so that we could have designed the most optimal experience for our users before completely focusing on the next feature.

Additional Design Assets