Designing a personal finance app that turns everyday expense tracking into clearer spending insights and manageable installment planning.
01 The Challenge
The challenge was to create a lightweight financial companion that could help users answer three everyday questions:
Where is my money going?
Am I staying on track?
What payments are coming next?
02 My Role
I worked with the product manager to translate the initial product idea into a mobile experience, from understanding user behaviors and defining the core journeys to wireframing, prototyping, and UI design.
03 Understanding the Problem
I interviewed three potential users to understand how they currently manage everyday expenses, what usually causes them to lose track of spending, and how they handle recurring payments and installments.
Users often relied on memory, notes, or manual records. Small daily expenses were especially easy to forget.
Knowing how much was spent wasn’t enough. Users needed to understand where their money was going across categories and over time.
Recurring payments created another mental burden: remembering what had already been paid, what remained, and when the next payment was due.
04 Turning Insights into Product Priorities
05 Designing the Experience
Design Decision 01
Decision
Instead of making users dig through reports to understand their financial position, I designed the home screen as a daily financial snapshot.
What the home screen answers
Design Decision 02
Decision
Expense tracking only works if users actually keep doing it. The transaction flow needed to capture enough information to make reports useful without turning every expense into a long form.
What each field is for
Design Decision 03
Decision
Recording expenses has little value if users still can’t understand their behavior. I designed the reporting experience progressively: from a monthly overview, to category-level spending, and finally to individual transactions.
Progressive disclosure
Design Decision 04
Decision
Installments behave differently from everyday expenses: users don’t only need to know what they paid, but also what remains and what is coming next.
On the screen
06 The Experience as a System
Rather than designing four disconnected features, the experience was structured as a loop: users record their spending, understand their patterns, plan around their commitments, and return with a clearer picture of their finances.
07 How We Would Measure Success
Before launch, we defined behavioral indicators that could help us understand whether users were adopting the core financial-management behaviors.
Transaction logging frequencyAre users returning to record expenses consistently?
Monthly report engagementAre users using what they recorded to understand their spending?
Installment tracking adoptionAre users with installments using the payments feature to manage them?
08 Reflection
A financial tool can provide detailed charts and features, but it only becomes useful if recording information is easy enough to sustain as a habit.
Spentify taught me to think about the relationship between input and value: ask users for as little effort as possible, then give them something meaningful back.
That’s Spentify.
Next case study CapiterHave a project in mind? Let’s create something great together.
