travel ease
budgeting app
Travel Ease is a budgeting app in development that uses a friendly interface to help people budget, plan trips, take care of house hold or group expenses and share their costs with other people. The main target of the app are teachers that manage class funds, plan field trips or take care of expenses for an entire group and must stay in budget and track all their spending.
the project
The marketing team decided the MVP should focus on teachers, but leave options open for expanding to other potential target groups, such as young adults splitting their costs with flat mates or couples wishing to split household expenses.
We decided early on that Travel Ease should feel custom to each user and tailored to the way they use their app. The onboarding is focused on understanding the user's goals and expectations and later on provide the widgets that are actually useful for their approach to spending and tracking.
my role
lead ui / ux designer
-
Research user behavior related to budgeting and tracking expenses
-
Research the market and see what options users have at the moment
-
Create different user personas to approach the UX from different angles
-
Create user flows and test user scenarios with different user goals in mind
-
Design the UI & UX of the mobile app
-
Create low & high fidelity prototypes
-
Provide branding concept ideas to the client and work with them to chose an appropriate mood
-
Design the screen transition and animations and work closely with the developers that implement them
challenges
Making the app feel custom to the user was the challenge of the project. We mapped out dozens of user scenarios, created a handfull of user personas and tried to get in the skin of people that use the app. We looked at existing apps on the market and decided most of them are not user friendly - they show graphs or data that is hard to use in any meaningful way. Our challenge was to display financial information in a way that is accessible to a parson that, frankly, is bad with money.
what i learned
My takeaway from this project is the experience I gained in creating and working with user scenarios, user personas and UX flows. The project had an extended discovery phase that allowed for the app to be thoroughly thought out and multiple ways of approaching different problems could be tested out.
