Charuta Kulkarni

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FutureFund

A personal finance management platform focused on women empowerment.
#Client Project
#UX Design
Overview
FutureFund is an early-stage personal finance start-up. It aims to improve financial literacy, particularly among women, and offer wealth-building opportunities through a two-sided marketplace for clients and financial advisors.
Project goal
The startup was undergoing a pivot. Our team helped the startup align with the aforementioned objective by designing the advisor focused platform.
my role
Product Designer
project duration

2 Months

My responsibilities
Ideation, Content Research, Sketching, Wireframes, Prototyping.
feature 1

One stop platform to manage finances, investments, insurance, and debt.

feature 2
Goal setting and tracking of milestones
feature 3
Suggests expense and investment revisions to achieve goals.

DESIGN PROCESS

STEP 1 - IDENTIFYING BUSINESS GOALS

CHALLENGES FACED BY THE USERS
There are two primary users, financial advisors, and clients (Millennial Women), who will be using the FutureFund app. The challenges faced by both of these groups were identified using ethnographic surveys and interviews.
Challenges faced by Clients (Millennial Women)
  • Finding a trusted advisor who can help establish realistic life goals by strategizing every day/monthly spending to achieve those goals
  • Getting matched with an advisor who can work with someone that doesn’t have much knowledge about financial planning.
  • In general, financial advisors draft a big-picture goal and devise plans to achieve it. In everyday life, it becomes hard to follow those plans and achieve the saving target, and the end goal is derailed.
Challenges faced by Financial Advisors
  • Loss of time and resources as the client finds a mismatch at a later stage.
  • Keeping track and adjusting micro-goals for each client requires a huge undertaking.
  • Lots of overhead to manage individual clients’ financial portfolios while understanding their needs and wants.

Opportunity

To create a one-stop application that gives advisors the ability to manage portfolios while providing a financial roadmap with long, short,& micro milestones to the clients.

STEP 2 - ANALYZING SCOPE OF WORK

SCOPE OF WORK

Being the third cohort working on the project, stitching a coherent workflow and completing the advisor features was crucial. So, to build the advisor platform, we set out to develop a strong understanding of both the user groups (advisors and clients), given the interdependencies of workflows across these user groups.​ Personal finance is a broad domain, so we defined clear scope and deliverables to achieve a timely launch.​

ELEMENTS OF THE WORKFLOW

As shown in the image below, the advisor workflow constituted the following design components:

  • advisor dashboard landing pages,
  • client on-boarding, and
  • multiple wealth management pages.
PRIORITIZING FRAMEWORK TO UNBLOCK THE LAUNCH
To unblock the launch, we prioritized option 1 of the following two options:
Option 1

Design the end-to-end advisor dashboard and get it launch ready.

Option 2
Design and test usability of only few functionalities
Prioritization Rationale

Completing option 1 (end-to-end advisor dashboard) constituted the minimum viable product that early investors, as well as early adopters, were interested to see.

DESIGN CHALLENGES

My Role

My focus was to research, strategize, and design content for the financial advisor workflow for the following pages.

STEP 3 - UNDERSTANDING THE FINANCIAL ADVISOR WORKFLOWS AND PROCESSES

FUTURE FUND DESIGN TEAM

We were a team of three (3), two (2) UX Designers and the CEO of FutureFund. 
GETTING TO KNOW THE WORK PROCESS
Being unfamiliar with the financial advisors’ work processes, I used our weekly meeting to understand how they operate, what criteria they look for, and how they plan for investment and maximum returns. I started by studying the terminologies, understanding what are important factors for consideration, and looking at competitive services like Wealthfront. The clarifications I received from the client (financial advisor) helped me design workflows that were human-centric and practical. 

STEP 4 - DESIGNING PAGES AND DEVELOPING PROTOTYPES

REDESIGNING THE DASHBOARD

We started the project by analyzing the existing dashboard. We redesigned the basic components with the following design objectives:

  • simplify navigation
  • draw the user to the salient bits of information.

Before

After

Revision Summary

ADVISOR LANDING PAGE

At its core, FutureFund encourages women to be financially independent by setting goals that are achieved by incrementally changing their spending patterns. The spending information is managed through the budgets page.

Key design issues with the previous budget page:
  • Was built with only end-users in mind i.e. was misaligned with advisor workflow
  • Disconnected from the rest of the pages such as goal setting
  • Not intuitive to see how budget impacted investments
Key design issues with the previous budget page:
  • Showed a high-level analysis of spending patterns
  • Linked budget info to other pages such as goal setting
  • Offered recommendations on next steps to achieve targets

Before

After

retirement PAGE

The goals and budgets are set to prepare for a financially sound retirement. FurtureFund uses a customized retirement calculator that uses multiple factors and considerations.
Key design challenges:
  • Needed to be designed from scratch
  • Needed to be integrated with a set of proprietary calculators
  • Needed to offer easy changes to end goals (e.g. due to changing financial circumstances)

Revisions Summary

  • Included retirement calculators along with various scanerios.
  • Included customizable knobs so users could select their preferred scenario.
  • Offered projections for easy visualization

Before

After

plan of action page

This page was expected to drive the main message of company – future belongs to those who plan for it.
Key design challenges:
  • It needed to allow for performing some of the most important actions such as goal creation.
  • The page had to be created from scratch
Revisions Summary
  • Created the editable settings to be obvious and easy-to-access
  • Used a tab format for easy switching between actions to be performed

Before

after

STEP 5 - GETTING THE CLIENT BUY-OFFS

designing for all

We went an extra mile to design an inclusive website, by incorporating the following factors:

project hand-off

At the end of four weeks, we gave the client a working prototype of the advisor user flow. This was the first time the client could see the platform with all its functionalities.