Financial Management App with AI

Why this project?

What is the product about? ⭐

Arrow is a personal finance management app that allows user to track transactions, create and maintain budgets & achieve financial goals with the help of AI.

What am I trying to solve? 🔍

Users struggle to maintain their finances, track their budgets achieve their financial goals, lack proper assistance to guide them to take financial decisions.

How does it benefit the business? 💼

I have focused more on increasing the loyalty of the users for the app, leading to increased retention, brand recognition and better potential for future monetization options within the app.

Say Hi to Arjun!👋🏼

Arjun is the protagonist of my design story. He is a 25y/o freelance architect, who is having a hard time managing his expenses.

Check out why Arjun has downloaded the app, and how his journey of using the app has been. 👇

Let us take some interesting halts in the design! 🤩

Why have I shown burgers in the monthly report? 🍔

To break the monotonous tone of my initial report design, I wanted to create an engaging and playful representation of the users savings with respect to the expenses they had done.

Oh wait! Arjun finds this interesting! 😍

So did my users from my testing! ✅

They found this to be an interesting comparison.

How has the page evolved from scratch?

I wanted to provide a small hook to the users where they would come back every month to know the comparison, which lacked in the previous iterations.

Thereby also staying up-to date with their finances.

Let’s look at 1 example of AI helping Arjun🦾

Arjun wants to edit the budget amount after an increment

Arjuns opens the budget he had created a few months back

He understands how much money is left from the budget

The app calculates how much money is left for the monthly budget, for Arjun to spend. 🤑

From my primary research, I observed that the users face a problem of altering their budgets during the initial months, after any crisis, or ignore to replan their budget, which hampers with their tracking, and financial planning.

To solve this, I wanted the users to use AI, aiding them to rebalance budgets when required, after analyzing their income and spending pattern.

Here AI acts as an advisor, suggesting the users with an action to take.

Arjuns ignores it for now, as he wants to do it manually. 😎

With the help of the coloured arrows, he is able to see that the spending for "Food & Drinks" has increased compared to last month. 😮

Here AI is used to analyze and show the performance of the user as compared to the previous month. This can act as an information or an alert to the user.

He also sees that he has spent on charity this month, which he had never done before. 🫶🏼

After transaction analysis, AI notices a new type of expenses, and asks Arjun if he wants to add it to his budget.

Arjun goes to the insights to learn about his budget performance.

My user interviews revealed a strong need for real-time budget tracking and insights. This transparency empowers users to monitor their progress and adjust spending habits as needed.

Arjun understands that his shopping spends have gradually increased over the months, 🫢 and he is worried on how he is going to correct it.

Here the spending insight alerts about increased spending, and also suggests setting up an alert.

Arjun goes to the edit budget page and changes his total budget amount to ₹25,000.

But he is confused on how to change the limit for the categories. 😕 He has never done it before and wonders how to do it.

He also sees the warning signs next to a category and recalls that he had spent high this month on that category. 😶‍🌫️

Incase the user wants to edit the limits manually, I wanted to provide an alert to the users, to notify them of hitting the limit.

Right then he notices that he can use AI to rebalance his budget. He is relieved about it and is curious to see how it goes. 😇

I wanted to utilize AI here in a way which analyzes the transactions and patterns of the users, after which a personalized suggestion is provided, which the user can choose to opt for.

The idea of rebalancing from smallcase, during my secondary research.

After clicking AI Budget Rebalance, the app calculates the new personalized budget along with the spending limits for categories. The user has the freedom to save it or manually recalculate the budget.

He is also able to identify where the changes have been made with the help of the coloured arrows.

He saves the budget. And now he can see the changed budget. 😊

How did I want to use AI?

An initial sketch of my design, involving an AI chatbot performing all the tasks.

My initial idea- The user being the runner, and AI being the player.

Should AI do all the work?

My initial idea of the app involved AI being the primary part of the app, doing all the work, acting more like a chat assistant.

But it didn't feel right 🤔

After a point, I didn't like it. It felt like the user would be the runner and AI would be the player in the game temple run. Meaning AI would control the user, but not the vice-versa. It would give full control to AI, and no control over decision making to the users.

Users can learn finances from decision making, and I didn't want to loose it.

To add on, according to my survey of 102 people, the majority of them did not prefer AI taking decision and doing financial activity.

Hence my decision of "AI not as a shortcut, but just as an assistant"

Whats behind the scenes? 🎥

The workspace! Dont worry! It'll be clean before you call me for an interview 😉

Almost the end...

What next for Arrow? 🚀

An All in one app with investments and broking to make Arrow a one stop shop for all finances.

Joining friends and family for a collaborative goal setting and accomplishment.

A dedicated verified finance community to share opinions and learn from others.

A customizable AI assistant

A journey with lessons! 💯

The importance of creating a user journey has been one of the most concrete lessons from this journey, as it made me understand the user goals for each and every step.

Empathizing with users and deriving user goals, painpoints and opportunities showed me the need for user interviews which led me towards crafting a better journey.

Realized the importance of user testing and how it can create impact where I never noticed.

If you liked this teaser of my project, contact me to check out the full picture!

Contact me