There is a disconnect between budgeting and banking. Many Americans report having a budget but not enough savings to cover an emergency and overdraft fees are costly. Quse is a startup company in the FinTech space that wants to resolve this disconnect with a budgeting app experience for web and mobile that keeps your money in line. Quse lines your money up in queues based on whether it is committed (scheduled to be spent on necessities and scheduled to be saved) or available (to be spent more generally). These queues feed individual accounts at your bank to keep your money aligned with its purpose.

Objective: This project included two phases. First was identity and brand design for the startup and second was interface design for the web and mobile app experience of the budgeting tool.

I worked with my development partner, Tim, and our client, Quse founder Chris, to define the MVP experience, which would include:

An onboarding quiz and email verification to create an account
Personalized dashboard displaying committed vs available funds
Transaction categorization features

Process: The first design deliverables for the MVP centered around the login experience and an onboarding quiz. The onboarding quiz gathered personal (profile) information such as demographic information and information on who they budget for and more financial information like income and goals. It took no more than five minutes to complete as we were concerned about completion rates. We used email verification as the final step of account creation since security is important especially for banking apps.

Quse marketing landing page and entry point to web application

Once the user is verified, they can log in and see their personalized dashboard, which estimates their committed and available funds based on the information they gave during the onboarding quiz.

Personalized dashboard showing available (left) and committed (right) funds

Users could then choose to refine their budget plan in as much detail as they chose to get even more accurate fund information. The more accurate the information they provide, the more beneficial Quse would be to them as a money ordering tool.

A list of committed expenses (bills) and how to add a category inside the committed queue

It was important to differentiate features for free and paid users of the Quse app. After a round of competitive research, it became clear that the industry precedent is to have free versions of budgeting apps offer only the ability to manually add and categorize transactions. So we followed suit, allowing only users to see all their transactions through bank connection and accept or amend them to the appropriate budget queue. Transactions could of course be edited by both user groups.

Free users could manually add each transaction

Paid users could connect their bank accounts and credit cards to Quse and simply confirm and edit transactions as needed

All users also had access to the inventory page where they could see and sort all transactions by budget queue in one location.

To expedite delivery, we leveraged the Ant Design System, customizing design and development on top of those existing patterns. All designs were created in Figma. I delivered a full UI Library to the client with the already described user flows for web and mobile experiences.

Conclusion: The client was very happy with the deliverables and has been steadily commissioning the addition of features as he builds relationships with banks and grows Quse. My favorite part of freelance work is partnering with small business owners and entrepreneurs and helping them bring their visions to life.