How can we design an app that provides a guide for better financial decisions? Users typically invest based on in-app offers, but, to help customers achieve their dreams, we can change that approach. While working on a recent investment product for our client, we found that users needed help first making sense of their investments by setting their desired goals, and only then building a financial strategy.

A lot of advisors and wealth managers only talk about how much capital growth they can produce but don't help their clients prioritize financial life goals and understand the opportunities this money can bring.

Developing a new type of product always runs the risk of being unclear to users. As we implement non-standard features, user interaction may get complicated because of the need to learn and adapt to an unfamiliar mental model. To seamlessly integrate unique model, we should focus on researching user scenarios, prioritizing features in line with the business purpose and developing intuitive user flows.

To overcome this creative chaos, we strictly following the user-centered principle in our work ─ to build functionality according to the needs of the user. For example, during the client project, we placed emphasis on carefully developing user flows for the main scenarios in this particular product.

Find Meaning Behind Money to Bring Back Users' Excitement About Living

Financial planning isn't the most interesting thing for many. It's not easy to create long-term saving or investment habits, as that often isn't associated with positive emotions, and immediate needs feel more important. Also, at some stage, financially affluent people lose the joy of living. They earn money but no longer have a sense of fulfillment.

What if we switch focus from “Where do our users want to invest?” to “What do they want to achieve?” 

By taking into account insights from the UX research and placing a human being with hopes, fears and doubts at the center of our approach, we can create a financial management product vision that allows users to focus on their dreams and helps them bring back an excitement for life. A next-gen product design approach that combines habit formation and motivation with goal setting and gamification theories, focusing on creating an engaging experience that helps users manifest their future.

Dashboard with Dream Manifestation

Imagine that users sort their dreams into three categories: short, long and lifetime. When a user sees their short-term dreams being fulfilled, it excites them and gives the confidence boost to reach even their wildest long-term dreams. 

To help the users manifest their future, we can create a second dashboard option, a visual experience that encourages the manifestation process. Here, the users can turn all of the progress bars into pictures of their dreams; to literally live inside of their dream future.

When the users share their financial data and set up all of the dreams they want to achieve, we can offer a step-by-step financial plan with tasks and instructions on how to achieve these specific dreams with given value and in the established timeline.

Often people know that they want a better future, but it's hard for them to name specific dreams. Therefore, if a goal is not known, it's impossible to reach it. How do we get the users to put their dreams in writing?

To ease the decision-making and help users discover the possibilities, we can design the “dream catalog.” The dream catalog makes it possible to choose pre-set dreams based on the data the user has provided. Users can also choose dream “buckets'' with dreams that might be suitable for their desired lifestyle, for example, “wellness improvement.”

By focusing on providing visual financial experiences, we can be able to reduce the cognitive load for the users and increase engagement and clarity for even complex financial services.

Disruptive Innovations Arise From Crazy Ideas

Creating a financial product from scratch is often a confusing and complicated process. But with a creative team and open-minded approach, it's possible to carry out extraordinary ideas and combine even seemingly unimaginable things, as in this case, finances and dream manifestation.

We all get inspired by many different things ─ art, music, philosophy, movies, etc., and we don't even think about how these things can sync with the financial industry. But, all of this relates to the human experience, to our emotions and the meaning of life. And we need the courage to shift our mindset and bring all of that into the financial world to put real meaning behind the money!

Check out my blog about financial and banking UX design >>