Chase Finance Management Feature

Overview

As mobile usage for banking continues to grow, especially among millennials, Chase Bank is focused on strengthening their offerings on the mobile app.

Most customers have largely used the Chase mobile app to view transactions and make payments. They are now looking to expand their personal finance management capabilities for their mobile app, and provide users with personalized features that help them manage their finances.

I was the sole designer working on this new feature from researching, designing to testing. Note: This is a student project, I do not work for nor am affiliated with Chase.

Design Process

Research

Research Goals

• Understand what are other banking apps are offering for personal finance management

• To find out what methods do people currently use to manage their finance

• Learn about target users’ pain points when using Chase mobile apps

• Learn about users’ goals and needs with regards to personal finance

I did a competitive analysis of money management features with several banking and budgeting apps. It seems like most of the banking apps do not provide or only provide limited money management features. People are relying on budgeting apps to manage their money. However, security is a big concern when using 3rd party apps to budget finances third

I interviewed 4 active Chase mobile app users to understand their goals, frustrations, and needs for money management.

• They budget their money to reach their financial goals and control spending

• Users manage their finance with Excel or other budgeting apps

• Users have multiple accounts to manage

• They have trouble tracking their saving process, bill payment and categorized expenses

Problem Statement

How might we help Chase customers to find an easy way to manage their finance through Chase bank app instead of downloading more than one app to accomplish a task?

Ideate

I identified 4 main features that should be added to the Chase mobile app basing on my research findings.

How to maintain the existing organizational structure of the app while adding new features was a big challenge for this project. I created an app map to show that an Accounts Summary section will be added to the home screen from where users can tap “Manage My Money” to access more personal financial information.

From user interview findings, I identified some of the essential tasks users would like to perform with their banking app to manage their personal finance. And then I created an App Map of the simplest path needed for users.

Basing on the information architecture and flows, I sketched out how the key screens would be laid out. I drew from the existing brand and elements from Chase’s current UI.

I inspected Chase’s current typography and relied on screenshots to create icon and UI elements. I have also added some UI elements basing on my sketch to my UI Kit.

How it works

Good Discoverability with New Features

I want users to discover all the new features easily. However, by adding ALL new features to home screen means users need to scroll down a long way to view their accounts information. So how to maintain the existing organizational structure of the app while adding new features?

Instead of showing everything at once, I revised my design and added the “Manage My Money” feature under “Account Summary”.

Budget Overview

This feature allows user to know their spending progress in the current month and find out where do they spent most of their money on easily.

Easy Tracking of Income and Expenses

Users used to jump between several statements to collect their expenses information. This cash flow feature will save users from the trouble of tracking transactions and dealing with spreadsheets.

Recurring Bill Tracking

Users no longer need to digging through hundreds of transactions every month to make sure they paid their bill in the correct amount. They can track them easily with just one tap.

Prototype Test

Four tasks have been given to 5 participants:

• Find out how does their current month spending looks like compared with the budget

• Find out their savings for the past 3 months.

• Correct a transaction that has been put in the wrong category

• Check their upcoming and paid recurring bills

Users did not have any difficulty with completing the tasks above. The average testing time was 8 mins.

Iteration

Pain point: 3 of 5 users mentioned they also would like to have categorized budget to help them control on category spending.

Challenge: How can I include all the information users need (total spending VS budget, categorized spending VS budget, largest spending, add a budget, budget editing ability) in one place?

Solution: My initial thought was to have different colors represent different categories in the pie chart to solve the issue. However, that means users need to tap multiple times to get the information they want. Therefore, I decided to change the entire layout to have everything in one place.

Next Step and Reflection

The next steps for Chase will be to retest the prototype iterations in another round of usability testing and refine it as necessary.

It was challenging to work within an existing design system on a new feature but it helped me to learn how to develop better design solutions. I did my best to ground my new feature idea within existing data but it wasn’t until I was able to test it out with users that I knew for sure whether or not the idea was worthwhile and what it would take to get users to adopt it.