CLIENT:
HU
YEAR:
2024
ROLE:
PRODUCT DESIGNER
Three things every option got wrong
International students don't just need an expense tracker. Existing tools we studied: Cleo, Dyme, YNAB, Revolut, each solved part of the problem and missed the rest.
They needed a way to automate boring tasks, a dashboard that made sense instantly, a tool that felt like a friend
offering nudges and encouragement, and rent and tuition tools that matched their real lives, without feeling like they
were failing every time they opened the app.
Finance design is emotional design
We spoke to 7 international students, ran a survey, and studied competitor apps. Two things came back consistently: students hated manual tracking ("I always forget"), and they described money in emotional terms; fear, stress, surprise, not spreadsheet terms.
That told us something the brief hadn't: this wasn't a data-visualisation problem. It was an emotional-design problem wearing a finance-app costume.
Says, thinks, does, feels
The empathy map is what surfaced the gap between what students said they wanted (numbers) and what actually changed their behaviour (reassurance).
What we tried, and why none of it worked alone
We sketched three directions and tested them as standalone concepts. Every one of them got rejected, but not fully, students loved parts of each.
The first version looked like homework
Our first prototype was a card-based dashboard, full of text, tables, and tabs. In testing, students called it "homework." One laughed at it. That reaction was more useful than any usability score.
Where the senior-level judgment calls happened
One decision changed the entire product more than any screen redesign.
The companion, not the dashboard
How the work actually happened
What I'd do next
