¢ents App
¢ents
Project Overview
Helping Students Succeed Financially.
Navigating personal finances for the first time can be a big challenge for students balancing tuition, living expenses, and often, limited funds. Cents is a mobile student finance app designed to provide an easy-to-use solution for tracking expenses, setting budgets, and helping to achieve financial goals, coupled with a brand identity that seeks to connect with the student demographic.
Cents icon sketch
Research and Discovery
In order to properly ideate scope for this project, I wanted to focus on what features exist in the marketplace and what the demographics are of those who use these services. Understanding the users and their needs is the goal with my research.
Competitive Analysis
To establish a baseline foundation for Cents, research was undertaken to understand the financial habits and needs of university students:
- User Interviews: In-depth conversations with a diverse group of students revealed key pain points, including the difficulty of tracking small, frequent expenses, a lack of clear visibility into where their money was going, and a desire for more personalized guidance on budgeting. Students expressed a need for tools that were simple to use and visually appealing.
- Usability Surveys: Web-based surveys provided statistical validation of the interview findings. The data highlighted common budgeting challenges, preferred features in finance apps (simplicity, visual summaries), and the prevalence of financial stress among students.
- Competitive Analysis: An examination of popular finance apps indicated both strengths and opportunities in the market. This analysis revealed a noticeable gap in apps specifically tailored to the student demographic.
Strategy and concept
The insights provided from the research phase helped to inform my strategy for "Cents," which centers on creating an intuitive, visual user experience designed specifically for students. The guiding concepts were:
- Easy Tracking: Reducing the level of effort involved in recording financial transactions through features like quick-add options and intelligent categorization suggestions.
- Visual Clarity: Translating complex financial information into data visualizations, such as charts and graphs.
- Goal-Oriented Motivation: Helping students to define their financial goals better, providing reachable targets to work towards.
- Financial Education: Personalized literacy content within the app, delivered in a meaningful way, to enhance students' understanding of financial topics.
Color Palettes
Walmart SmartTv Loading Screen
Walmart SmartTv Login Screen
Walmart SmartTv Home Screen
Walmart SmartTv Spark+ Player
Design Process
My design process followed standard UX methodologies. I started by mapping out key user flows, carefully considering the path from watching content to Browse related products and adding them to a cart, ensuring minimal friction.
Next, I created low-fidelity wireframes for the essential screens (like Home, Player, Search, Personalization, etc. ). This allowed me to focus on optimal layout, clear navigation using a standard TV remote, and strategic placement for the shopping call-to-actions. I explored various ways to trigger the "Shop the Scene" feature to ensure it felt user-initiated and not like a pop-up ad.
From there, I moved into UI design, working within and further translating well-defined brand guidelines to be applicable to an entertainment context. I built high-fidelity mockups and an interactive prototype using Figma. This prototype brought the core user journey to life, specifically demonstrating how the "Shop the Scene" interaction would work within the player – designed to be subtle until the user chose to engage.
Final Outcome
The culmination of my design process was a high-fidelity interactive prototype demonstrating the Spark+ concept. This deliverable showcased key screens and interactions, including:
- The personalized home screen experience.
- Content Browse and discovery flows.
- The video player featuring the subtle "Shop the Scene" prompts.
- The clean product detail overlay appearing within the app.
- The integrated Walmart wishlist/cart view.
My key achievement was creating a tangible design concept that successfully visualized how Walmart could potentially blend streaming entertainment with its e-commerce strengths in a user-centric way, offering a distinct experience in the competitive streaming market.
Walmart SmartTv Loading Screen
Walmart SmartTv Login Screen
Walmart SmartTv Home Screen
Walmart SmartTv Spark+ Player
Spark+ Homescreen Mock-up
Reflection
This project was a great learning experience for me, particularly in designing for the specific constraints and opportunities of the Smart TV environment. It really pushed me to think critically about how to balance dual user goals – entertainment and shopping integration – within one simple user interface.
To this project further, my next steps would involve further user testing of the prototype with target users to gather feedback and refine the viewing in-shopping experience. I would also look at introducing a Spark+ music service.