About
LifeCents designed a curriculum for Americans who struggle to save money, but found it difficult to keep users engaged. They needed a modern solution to address critical needs.
Users & Audience
Money is difficult to talk about, even with your closest friends. An app is one way to return privacy to users and empower them with expert backed information.
Through empathetic user discovery and research, my team learned about the users' emotional anguish in discussing personal finance. Users felt the only thing that could change their financial lives were windfalls, suffering from lottery syndrome.
On the opposite side of the equation are the users' employers and local governments. They wanted a way to incentivize healthier financial habits, improving their businesses and strengthening communities for the long term.
Roles & Responsibilities
I contributed to a new iOS, Android, and web application that brought knowledge into a user's hand, incentivized long-term engagement, and built healthier habits.
I was primarily a visual designer responsible for brand, a cross-platform design system, and high-fidelity mockups. While interactive prototypes were not within the scope of the client contract, I found they created an effective communication tool and produced many throughout the project to facilitate new ideas.
Designing a Personality
My team made an early decision to cull the lengthy curriculum down into a digestible interface: chat messaging. Avoiding common chat bot pitfalls, this interface was not personified and did not trivialize a users input.
Our 'bot' was confident and knowledgable, yet friendly and encouraging. Careful attention was paid to microinteractions throughout the chat flow, celebrating small victories, and softening the blow of wrong answers to reduce emotional toll on a user's psyche.
I prototyped several interactions in the app that were designed for proactive discovery and interactive visualization exploration. In this way, a user's progression is modeled around their personal habits & behavior.
Outcome
This design helped LifeCents secure additional venture funding, sold over 300+ white label instances of the platform to local businesses, and contributed to a more successful signup & onboarding completion rate, which exceeds 94%.
Users have access to a growing platform of financial lessons, and employer sponsors see increases in their employee benefit plans as a result of the new education.