A nugget of insight is found through research. We studied how people behave around money rather than how they describe it, and four principles kept surfacing: mental accounting, the pain of paying, the abstraction of money, and opportunity cost.
Open data sharpened it further. Most of a pay cheque gets spent, most people check their finances on a phone every day, and few could cover a thousand pound emergency. Each of those became a design decision rather than a slide.
Facets polished to shine bright. The product went live with a deliberately small set of features, each one traceable to something the research or the testing had told us.
Testing showed that people struggle to set limits on the spot, so the tool reads their spending and proposes a single monthly goal instead. Unusual activity surfaces as a highlight of the month, large purchases come back for review, and open banking consolidates the rest. Strategic insights shown here are skewed for presentation purposes, and results may differ from the client’s official stance.
Next projects.
(2016-25©)
