Personal finance, made simple and safe.
FlowPay is a mobile app that helps users manage their finances through budgeting, spending insights and financial education. My goal was to simplify complex financial information into a clear, accessible experience that moves people from passive tracking to actively managing their money.
From tracking to managing
I designed a mobile app, FlowPay, to help users better manage their finances through budgeting, spending insights and educational resources. My goal was to simplify complex financial information into a clear, accessible experience that helps users track expenses, set goals and build stronger financial habits.
The app brings together budgeting tools, investment tracking and financial learning into a single platform, helping users move from passive tracking to actively managing their finances.
Research → define → structure → iterate
I followed a product design process focused on understanding user behaviour, defining clear problems, and iterating towards simple, usable solutions.
I began by conducting user research to understand how people currently manage their finances and identify key challenges around budgeting, spending and financial literacy. Using these insights, I defined the core problems and product goals, then mapped out the information architecture and key user flows to ensure a clear and intuitive structure. I explored solutions through wireframes and iterated on them before developing high-fidelity designs focused on clarity, usability and accessibility.
Understanding financial behaviour
I conducted user interviews and surveys to better understand financial behaviours, challenges and user needs. The research focused on how users track spending, manage budgets and make financial decisions, as well as their confidence in using financial tools. These insights helped identify key pain points and informed the direction of the product.
The interviews revealed common challenges such as difficulty tracking expenses, maintaining consistent budgets, and understanding financial terminology. These insights directly informed the design of features focused on clarity, guidance and ease of use. Key questions explored:
How do you currently manage your finances?
Most users rely on banking apps to check balances and transactions, but struggle to gain a clear understanding of their overall spending and find it difficult to maintain consistent budgets.
What are your main financial challenges?
Common challenges include impulse spending, difficulty tracking daily expenses, managing irregular income, and a lack of clear saving strategies.
How do you stay informed about financial news?
Most users do not actively follow financial news, instead relying on occasional updates from social media or conversations, leading to limited financial awareness.
How do you make investment decisions?
Users often depend on recommendations from friends or family rather than conducting their own research, highlighting a lack of accessible and trusted financial guidance.
What are your short-term and long-term financial goals?
Users have a mix of short-term goals such as saving for purchases or travel, and long-term goals like buying a home or planning for retirement, but lack structured ways to achieve them.
Are you comfortable sharing financial data with apps?
Some users express concerns around privacy and security when connecting financial accounts, which impacts trust in financial applications.
What features would you want in a finance management app?
Users consistently request features such as automatic expense tracking, customisable budgets, clear financial insights, and accessible investment guidance.
Validating the patterns
To complement the interviews, I conducted a survey with 10 participants to gather additional insights into financial behaviours and common challenges. The results helped validate patterns identified during interviews and highlighted recurring issues:
Inconsistent saving habits
Users struggle to maintain regular saving patterns due to unclear goals and limited guidance.
Impulse spending behaviour
Users frequently make unplanned purchases without understanding the impact on their budget.
Limited financial knowledge
Users lack confidence in financial concepts, making it harder to make informed decisions.
Budgeting feels overwhelming
Existing tools feel complex, discouraging users from actively managing their finances.
Need for clearer guidance
Users want simple, actionable recommendations to help manage their money more effectively.
Ellen & Conor
Based on the research findings, I created two personas to represent key user types and their financial behaviours, challenges and goals.
Ellen — 26 years old, working professional
Ellen has a stable income but struggles to manage her finances effectively. She finds budgeting overwhelming and lacks clear visibility into her spending. While she wants to feel more in control, complex tools and financial terminology make it difficult to stay consistent. She is motivated to improve her financial habits but needs clearer guidance and simpler ways to manage her money.
- Struggles to track where her money is going.
- Finds budgeting tools complex and difficult to maintain.
- Lacks confidence in financial decision-making.
- Gain a clear overview of her finances.
- Build consistent saving habits.
- Understand financial concepts in a simple, accessible way.
Conor — 19 years old, student
Conor works part-time and has an irregular income, making it difficult to manage expenses and plan ahead. He often loses track of spending and runs out of money before the end of the month. Financial planning feels confusing and time-consuming, so he tends to avoid it. He wants simple tools that help him stay in control without adding extra effort.
- Irregular income makes budgeting difficult.
- Struggles to track daily spending.
- Often runs out of money before the end of the month.
- Track income and expenses more clearly.
- Stay on top of payments and avoid overspending.
- Build simple, manageable financial habits.
How users think & feel about money
I created an empathy map to synthesise research findings and better understand users' motivations, frustrations and behaviours. This helped identify patterns in how users think about money, how they feel about financial management, and how they currently interact with financial tools.
Thinks
- "I want to save for future goals."
- "I need better control over my spending."
- "I wish I understood investing better."
Feels
- Frustrated about inconsistent saving.
- Stressed about financial uncertainty.
- Motivated to improve financial habits.
Says
- "I'm not sure where my money goes."
- "I want better tools to manage finances."
- "I want safe and reliable financial apps."
Does
- Checks bank balance frequently.
- Uses multiple apps for financial tasks.
- Occasionally seeks investment advice.
Revolut, Monzo & N26
I analysed three leading finance apps to understand how they support users in managing their finances: Revolut, Monzo and N26.
The analysis highlighted common patterns in budgeting tools, spending insights and financial features, as well as opportunities to improve clarity, accessibility and guidance within the experience.
Eight goals to design against
Based on research insights and competitor analysis, the following design goals were defined:
Design tools that help users actively understand and manage their finances, rather than simply viewing balances or transactions.
Simplify complex financial information into clear, structured, and easy-to-scan interfaces.
Provide meaningful insights and context that support better financial decision-making.
Support consistent budgeting, saving, and tracking to encourage long-term financial habits.
Integrate educational content that is directly relevant to users' financial situations.
Build user confidence by presenting financial concepts in a simple and approachable way.
Provide guidance that helps users set realistic goals and stay on track over time.
Reduce cognitive load through clear hierarchy, progressive disclosure, and intuitive interactions.
Five clear areas
I designed the information architecture to organise the app's features into a clear, intuitive structure, making it easy for users to access key financial tools such as budgeting, expense tracking, investments and financial education.
I analysed patterns from existing finance apps like Revolut, Monzo and N26, which commonly structure their products around a central dashboard supported by dedicated sections for managing different financial tasks. Based on these insights, I structured the app around five primary navigation areas, allowing users to move seamlessly between managing finances, tracking spending, exploring investments, and improving financial literacy.
Core actions, mapped
I mapped key task flows to define how users complete core actions such as creating a budget and viewing a monthly spending report. This helped identify friction points, reduce unnecessary steps, and ensure each flow felt clear, guided and efficient.
Testing structure before visuals
I created low-fidelity wireframes to explore layout, information hierarchy and interaction patterns before moving into visual design. This let me quickly test and iterate on different approaches, ensuring key tasks, budgeting, tracking spending, and accessing insights, could be completed clearly and efficiently.
Clear, approachable, consistent
The visual design makes financial information feel clear, approachable and easy to act on. I used a purple-led colour system for a distinctive identity while keeping strong contrast for key actions and important data. Typography and spacing establish a clear hierarchy so users can quickly scan balances, transactions and insights, and components were designed to be consistent and reusable across the app's many features.
An immediate overview
The high-fidelity designs bring together the research insights, information architecture and task flows into a complete mobile experience. Each screen was designed to support specific user goals, prioritising clarity, focused layouts, clear calls-to-action and progressive disclosure.
The home dashboard gives users an immediate overview of their financial position, combining balances, recent activity and quick actions in a single screen. The layout prioritises high-frequency tasks such as transfers and bill payments, while surfacing key insights to help users quickly understand their current financial state.
Investing without the jargon
The investment experience helps users understand and track their portfolio performance without requiring deep financial knowledge.
Users can view their holdings, monitor trends, and explore gainers and losers across different asset categories. Data is presented through simplified charts and summaries, making complex investment information easier to interpret and act on.
Bite-sized financial education
The learning section provides accessible, bite-sized educational content to help users build confidence in managing their finances.
Content is structured around practical topics such as budgeting, credit management and saving strategies, with a mix of short videos and articles. The goal is to support users in developing better financial habits through clear, actionable guidance.
A guided budgeting flow
The budgeting flow guides users through setting up a monthly budget in a clear, step-by-step process.
Users define their income, set a spending limit, and allocate budgets across categories, with each step designed to reduce complexity and support decision-making. A final preview allows users to review their setup and enable alerts, helping them stay on track over time.
Passive tracking → active management
The final design creates a unified experience that combines budgeting, investment tracking and financial education within a single, cohesive product.
- A clear dashboard that gives users an immediate understanding of their financial position.
- A guided budgeting flow that helps users set realistic limits and track their progress over time.
- Simplified investment views that make portfolio performance and market trends easier to understand.
- Integrated learning content that supports users in building financial knowledge and confidence.
Together, these elements shift the experience from passive tracking to active financial management.
Clarity, trust, usability
This project reinforced the importance of simplifying complex financial information into experiences that feel intuitive and manageable, designing for finance requires balancing clarity, trust and usability so users feel confident making decisions.
Through this work I developed skills in structuring complex systems, designing guided task flows and creating visual hierarchies that support quick understanding. The next step would be validating the designs through usability testing and iteration.
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