Unifimoney – Being the Product Design Team

The Client

Unifimoney is a fintech startup based in San Francisco. As the name suggests, Unifimoney is solving the problem of having to have multiple apps on your phone to handle the different areas of your financial life. That alongside, guiding you in growing your net worth over time with key features in investing, saving, and spending.
Unifimoney app screens

If you want to deal with a cash/checking account, you’ve most likely got that with a well-known bank. It’s where your salary gets paid into and it feels safe. If you’ve got a credit card, chances are that you have that with another provider or bank depending on rates, features, and benefits. If you invest your spare cash then you’ll have heard of Robinhood, Coinbase, and eToro, etc. Even if you want to transfer money around then you’ll probably have another app for that as well. 

It’s a very fragmented market with apps focussing on one task and trying to gather market share based on doing that well. It works but it’s just people being trained to do things in certain ways. Those learned ways of doing things have been in place for decades due to banking technology being so slow to evolve and them not wanting to change the way they do business. 

Well, what if you could have all of those features in a single service? Life becomes simpler when you don’t have to keep darting around apps to do singular tasks! Having everything in one place means that you have visibility of your financial life and situation, which gives you the power to change and grow that wealth over time using the same products as before, now all in a single app.

 

The Brief

We were asked to take over from an existing designer who was moving on. We to come in and own and fight for the UX and UI aspects of the product. We were given the power to be the User Experience Director for the product – a challenge we jumped at and relished.

There was an existing Figma file but it needed a lot of work to bring it up to a level that was suitable for handover. That handover was good but the design system needed quite the overhaul to be fully useable for multiple designers to use and for us to scale the app going forwads.

We needed to was to;

  • get under the skin of what Unifimoney wanted to achieve,
  • understand what was working and what wasn’t in their current feature design set,
  • design and build a design system that would allow us to working efficiently,
  • integrate into an existing agile build workflow with a number of offshore developer teams,
  • make incremental improvements to existing features in line with business requirements,
  • and work in the background to redesign the app to fall in line with the latest UX and UI patterns using our vast experience.

All to get us to launch not just an MVP but an MDP (minimum delightful product).

 

Our Approach

We’ve been working with Unifimoney for well over a year now designing, refining, testing, and launching features as the Unifimoney Design Team. We did this by putting together a small and focussed design team to dedicate time and thought to make Unifimoney the product Ben, Ed, and the rest of the leadership team wanted it to be. 

Our approach to this engagement was methodical and deliberate. We wanted to make serious changes to all the features within the boundaries of the app architecture but we knew we couldn’t just go ham fistedly into it making the bold changes we wanted and needed. We, instead, employed the engaged and outspoken user base to understand where problems in the app lay, and how they were affecting users.

We did this from two perspectives; firstly, from an ability to complete a task perspective (how efficient are the UX journeys), but also from a more holistic angle to continually understand the impact the app was having on how users were using other apps in that ‘finance’ folder on their phones (was the app fulfilling it’s target!). We ran a number of testing sessions where we’d explore the app with the user through interviews and weekly diaries to expose problems and inefficencies.

 

The Outcome

To date, we’ve redesigned almost all of the existing features and they’re in development as we type and we look forward to seeing the app grow in the future with our ongoing relationship with Unifimoney. 

 

Alongside this, we created a robust and scalable design system to allow the app to grow as and when it needed to beyond the launch.

To support this and explore this work more, we created a four part series deep-diving our work with the dashboard. The dashboard feature is a typically hard-working screen that needs to deliver quickly and satisfy a number of user and business requirements that, interestingly, ended up not being about the dashboard so much as the onboarding journey. A great read!

U.S. residents can download the app now from the Apple App Store. 

Read next...
Unifimoney app screens
In this partnership, we became the design team for Unifimoney. Learn how we work with them and how the dashboard feature grew over time.