Home

MyBudgetCoach Introduction

MyBudgetCoach (MyBC) is a financial wellness service that allows people to track their finances. There are three main tools in MyBudgetCoach, called, "My Budget", "My Expenses", and "My Goals". These tools needed to be redesigned to create a more modern UI and to create more flexibility in how the tools could be used. In addition, designing for mobile was very important so that people could track their expenses on the go, and so the creation of the UI was mobile-first.

The following are some representations of typical users of MyBudgetcoach, which are called either "members" or "coaches":

The Old Tools

The budget tool used to be very cluttered with spreadsheet-like data, including expense and income categories that relate to a person's spending. The dense budgets also included a third dimension of goals in addition to yearly data and a summary of everything called, “the bottom line.” The budget was much too crowded and hard to understand, even if just looking at the supposedly simple "bottom line."

Wireframes

Early in the process, I worked on several rounds of low-fi wireframes that were created and iterated over in short succession. Everything from functionality to microcopy was refined and presented using clickable prototypes.

Improvements to UX

I worked with developers to see if we could switch from showing both monthly and yearly views of budgets to showing only the current month. In addition, budget line items that were not used by the user would not show either, as we made a change to have the user add budget lines instead of getting every one possible by default.

Also, since the tools were already in use, I worked on sussing out some other pain points that users had. The tools used to be fairly isolated in that the user could do a particular action from one tool but not from another. I worked with developers to make sure that this wasn't the case anymore whenever possible, e.g. like how we made a change so that expenses could be edited from the budget tool and goals tool, not just from the expense tool.

Content Strategy

I worked on making a lot of the terminology more consistent across the various tools. For example, the expense tool may say that there's an "expense item" while the budget tool may say that there's a "line item". In reality, these were referring to the same thing:

Final Product

The final product ended up being received very well. Tools had perceived functions, like e.g. adding and viewing transactions in MyExpesnes, however, they became flexible enough to allow performing actions from different tools as well. Opening up the tools in this way actually allowed a more efficient tracking of expenses, budgets, and goals.