AI-driven financial app
We can observe an increasing amount of financial applications that are using personalization to tailor their services to your profile. By gathering data about your financial life they are able to give you recommendations, insights that are going to improve your spending habits and let you save money in a smarter way.
My role
I led the design of the Konviv mobile app during my internship from January till March 2018.
Customer insights & ideation
I partnered with two founders from Konviv to uncover insights and translate concepts into features that address customer behaviors and motivations.
Main features & technicality
I have consolidated a research on what features a financial application should have in order to empower user and teach him about having a better financial life.
Chatbot & AI character
I have brainstormed on what the financial character could be, how it could appear in the app and what would be its role. I have created screens to illustrate those different functionalities. Later I have worked on user case scenarios with the data scientists from Stanford that could be further translated into the functionality of the chatbot.
Experience Strategy & Vision
I created frameworks and prototypes to share the vision, design principles and content strategy. This helped to evangelize ideas, gain alignment and drive decision making.
The challenge
Create smart, friendly and highly functional banking app that users would love to use
An explosion of new consumer finance brands is transforming how people save, spend, and manage their money. Chatbots and conversational interfaces are a rapidly expanding area of venture investment and customer service budget. Many companies are already building finance-specific chatbots to help customers ask questions via chat such as “How much did I spend on groceries last month?” and “What was the balance of my personal savings account 60 days ago?”
Just as Amazon and Netflix can recommend books and movies better than any living human “expert,” ongoing conversations with financial personal assistants might do the same for financial products, as we see beginning to happen in the insurance industry.
Creating great financial assistance doesn’t revolve only about the chatbot experience itself but also about a smart way of managing money, giving you insights, analyzing your profile and teaching you about finance and your habits. Personalized apps, according to the research; are perceived as more trustworthy, objective, and reliable than in-person advisors.
Konviv had a very basic interface. The main challenge was to work on the buckets to make them approachable and useful to people. Another goal was to make insights something that people want to come back to and learn about their financial life. My challenge was to combine all of those functions into one unique experience.
How to make buckets easy to understand and manage?
How to make insights informative and actionable?
How to make a chatbot functional and enjoyable to use?
The competitors
Business goals
Make people come back to the app as often as possible
Let people interact with the chatbot as frequently as possible and let the users be able to ask the right questions and guide them towards making better financial decisions
Let people make a full use of the bucketing system and easily adjust them towards their needs
User goals
Easily interact with the chatbot and be able to ask the right questions and get the right answers that you can act upon
Easily manage buckets and add your own
Get a good grasp on the insights section
Get notified about upcoming payments
Be able to see all my spendings and easily know how much I can spend and for what
Be able to easily and fast understand how this app can actually help me and get a good understanding of the functionality
Be able to create saving buckets
The approach
Define the functionalities and prioritize
Onboarding
The role of the onboarding should be to get familiar with the chatbot character Viva.
Buckets
Often, loading up a new personal finance app means dealing with tons of permissions and passwords, followed by being dumped into an unfamiliar dashboard that it takes days or weeks to feel fully comfortable using. It can take a while to begin really getting value out of it. Konviv’s first-run experience is designed to show you that value right away. It works in 2 parts:
–After you connect your bank account, Konviv app goes through deposits to your bank account and figures out which represent your recurring income.
–The app then goes through different withdrawals from your bank account and figures out which represent your bills and other recurring expenses and categorizes it into buckets.
When that’s finished, you’re sent to the main dashboard of the app. The main dashboard of Konviv then uses income vs. expenses to show you the personalized buckets.
You don’t need to spend hours meticulously tagging each one to see your spending habits. By using the color each bucket background can be marked differently depending on how many funds are available in the bucket. You can also see the exact amount of the available funds.
Within a few minutes of using the app for the first time, in other words, millennials using Konviv can have an answer to a simple question that’s always on their minds—“Can I go out tonight or will I go broke?”
You can customize the buckets by adding or removing one. By clicking on a bucket you are giving a set of options to manage that bucket. You can adjust a bucket by changing its limit or the category. You can transfer money to that bucket from another bucket or simply from your account. Additionally, you can track the entire history of your spendings related to that bucket. If you overspent today, the buckets will adjust tomorrow so you get back on track.
Insights
One of the core sections of the app are the insights. They are generated based on the user spending history, spending habits and they create future forecasts. Insights should be approachable and easy to grasp just like your daily social feed. They should inform you but not overload you. They should be actionable when it is necessary.
Chat
Konviv chatbot has been designed to act as your financial buddy that can give you insights about your financial life. For example, you are at the dinner and you would like to know how much you can afford today.
You are shopping and you need to spend more than the capacity of your bucket. You can ask chatbot to adjust the bucket and it will automatically alter other buckets accordingly.
Chatbot can give you insights about any desired field. It has an intelligent menu from which you can choose tailored options to get more insights from a chatbot. Those options change in time as the chatbot learns about you and your needs.
Bills
Bill section gives you an overview of all the outstanding and paid bills during a month. You can see all your subscriptions and you can easily manage them, for example, unsubscribe from a specific service. The user is given two options whether to add a new bill or adjust the already existing ones.
Savings
Savings screen looks just like buckets screen. You can edit those buckets or add new ones.
Accounts
The account screen gives you an overview of all the account connected to Konviv app. You can see all the recent transactions.
Badges
A set of badges has been designed to reward people once they fall into their budget and they are not overspending. This system should encourage people to think more about their financial habits and how to improve their lifestyle.
Final thougths
Key learnings
Make insights actionable
So people can easily check how much they can spend today/this week on this or that. They want insights to tell them all the relevant info about their financial life but they also want to be able to get some customized insights based on their current needs or situation they are in. So to do that we need to provide people with interactive insights in form of cards.
People want a smart system
People want to be handheld in terms of saving money and they want a system to tell them how to do it obviously by the user’s approval.
Division of the functionalities
How much of the functionality should be given to the chatbot and how actionable should be insights. Are both necessary? If yes how to make these two distinguishable different and therefore useful and bold?
