Designing a Personal Finance App for Students with Irregular Income and Shared Bills
UX Design · User Research · Prototyping · Fintech
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
Nest is a personal finance app designed for students managing irregular income and shared expenses. It helps users track spending, set budgets, and manage their financial life in one approachable tool.
TIMELINE
2 Months
ROLE
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UX Designer and Researcher in a team of 3
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Conducted recruitment surveys, 15 out of 45 task-based testing sessions, 10 user interviews, and data analysis
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Created wireframes and prototypes in Figma, iterating from low to high fidelity
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Synthesized insights into personas, journey maps, and interaction flows
TOOLS
Figma, FigJam, Excel, Qualtrics
PROBLEM
For students, income is irregular, expenses are often shared, and financial apps feel overwhelming. In our interviews, most tracked expenses manually or juggled multiple tools — but still felt anxious and confused.
Our research consisted of 30 exploratory user interviews and 15 task based testing sessions, uncovered four recurring pain points:
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Unpredictable income: Scholarships, part-time jobs, and family support arrive irregularly, making budgeting stressful.
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Fragmented tools: Students juggle spreadsheets, banking apps, and mental math — none provide a unified view.
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Financial anxiety: Poor visibility makes students feel anxious. Many reported skipping meals or avoiding events to cope.
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Low awareness of support: Few knew about resources like campus financial counseling or food pantries.
THE USERS
Our research uncovered three primary student financial mindsets. Each persona represented a distinct financial lifestyle and pain point.
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Alex’s Journey: Irregular income and loan stress created constant anxiety and highlighted the need for clear debt tracking and goal-based savings tools.
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Maya’s Journey: Scattered tools and inconsistent tracking caused friction and pointed to the opportunity for a unified system combining budgeting, saving, and investment readiness.
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Rita’s Journey: Small, frequent purchases and lack of structured tools led to overdrafts and emphasized the need for simple budgeting and real-time spending alerts.
Together, personas and journey maps for Alex, Rita, and Maya revealed pain points across irregular income, daily spending, and financial confidence. These artifacts helped us prioritize features like goal-based saving, supportive nudges, and simplified dashboards.
OUR VISION
Nest’s vision was to reimagine everyday financial tasks through an app that feels supportive and tailored to students.
Based on what we learned from students, we asked, what if money management felt like guidance instead of punishment? To ground our vision, we conducted a competitive analysis, looking at existing tools to see where they fell short for student needs.
Our competitive review made one thing clear: while existing tools automate, reward, or educate, they fall short for students managing irregular income, shared expenses, and everyday financial stress.
To bridge this gap, we conducted observational studies with15 students, observing real financial workflows through exploratory interviews and identified five essential tasks that defined how they currently manage money. By mapping their baseline metrics, we created the foundation that guided our iterative design and testing process.
THE PROCESS
We followed an iterative process through research, design, prototyping, and testing with each stage shaped by direct user feedback.
Our design process combined divergent exploration with iterative refinement. Starting from multiple low-fidelity concepts, we converged into a consolidated mid-fidelity prototype and refined it into a cohesive high-fidelity system. At every stage, we conducted 15 task-based testing sessions with students, measuring completion rates, satisfaction, and time on task.
Early brainstorming translated research into functional requirements directly tied to student personas.
LOW FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
Each team member created an independent low-fidelity prototype exploring different approaches:
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Budgeting clarity
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Shared bill management
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AI-powered guidance and habit-building
Through testing, we learned that students gravitated toward card-based layouts and wanted clear progress indicators but disliked cluttered dashboards. Rather than choosing one direction, we used the results from testing and parallel explorations as a foundation for convergence.
MID FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
We merged the best elements from each exploration into a single consolidated prototype. This version emphasized:
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Modular financial task flows (budget, bill, loan, recurring charges, review)
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Visual clarity and approachable hierarchy
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Contextual assistance tailored to student behaviors
Testing revealed that this solution resonated significantly more with users.
HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
Finally, we refined the system into a polished high-fidelity product with a unified dashboard displaying net worth, loan progress, recurring bills, and active budgets as well as visual progress indicators to reduce cognitive load.
Through iterative design and testing, the high-fidelity prototypes delivered 100% task success and an average of 98% faster completion and 29% increase in satisfaction across 15 task-based testing sessions.
THE EXPERIENCE OF NEST
Rita is a college student juggling classes, friends, and part-time work. She opens Nest at the start of her week, hoping to finally feel in control of her money.
Chapter 1 - Setting a Budget
Rita starts her week by creating a simple budget in Nest. Instead of juggling spreadsheets, she automatically sees her income and bills populated in the app. After setting up a new budget, she can instantly see her financial picture for the month.
Chapter 2 - Splitting a Bill
At lunch with friends, Rita uses Nest to split a shared bill. She selects contacts, assigns amounts, and can see in real time who has paid, no awkward reminders needed.
Chapter 3 - Catching a Recurring Bill
Later, Nest surfaces a reminder for an upcoming loan payment. Instead of scrolling through her bank app, Rita sees all recurring charges neatly flagged in one place.
OUTCOMES
“This is such a thoughtful and well-executed project. You should be proud.”
- Amy King
29% ↑
USER SATISFACTION SCORE
User satisfaction scores improved by an average of 29%, with students describing Nest as “approachable” and “less stressful than other finance apps.
98% ↓
TIME ON TASK
Time on task improved by over 98% compared to baseline workflows across all tracked tasks, showing how Nest streamlined complex financial tasks into simple, repeatable actions.
The project also earned the top academic evaluation for the course. Designing Nest taught me how to turn financial anxiety into approachable, actionable design, and it deepened my ability to test rigorously while keeping solutions simple. These lessons now guide how I approach fintech and behavior-focused design challenges.
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