A simple financial app to build smarter money habits daily.
Opulence
February 2025
2 Months
Role: UX/UI Designer
Introducing
Small Steps, Big Goals
This beginner-friendly app helps you budget smarter, track spending effortlessly, and build healthy saving habits—all while learning to invest with confidence. Everything you need to start growing your money, all in one place.
Problems
Design with Purpose
Through interviews and testing, we identified the main pain points users experience with existing banking and financial tools.
Overwhelming Complexity
Traditional budgeting tools are often cluttered, confusing and overwhelming for beginners.
Inconsistent Saving Habits
Users forget to save regularly or struggle to build long-term saving habits.
Fear of Risk & Loss
Many users avoid investing due to fear of losing money or lack of knowledge.
Challenge
Create an intiuitve app that empower beginners to manage, save, and grow their money confidently.
Design process
Design Principles
Design principles applied throughout the design process.
User-Centered
Focusing on the needs, goals, and pain points of beginner budgeters to ensure the app feels intuitive, supportive, and genuinely helpful from day one.
Clarity & Simplicity
Keep visuals clean and focused, avoid overloading the viewer with too many elements at once.
Brand Consistency
Visual language, typography, spacing, and button styles are used consistently across screens to reduce cognitive load and create trust.
Hierarchy & Focus
Information is well-prioritized using size, contrast, and layout, guiding users to the most important tasks quickly.
Project timeline
Growing Pains
Roadblocks and Realizations
As the project progressed, balancing simplicity with feature depth became a challenge. Iterations often revealed new gaps, requiring quick pivots and thoughtful refinement to keep the experience both focused and functional.
Areas for Improvement —
Before high-fidelity, early prototypes were tested to catch usability issues and weak points. Feedback guided low-fi refinements, helping shape a clearer design foundation.
Lack of Visual Hierarchy
Without clear sizing, spacing, or emphasis differences between elements, users struggle to know where to focus first.
Weak Consistent Language Use
Users could add savings goals, they suggested renaming "Saving Goals" and integrating them more clearly into the dashboard for better accessibility and consistent language use, for less confusion
Lack of Navigation Bar Accessibility
The bottom navigation bar could have labels for clear navigation and better accessibility for different users.
Introducing
Opulence
After rounds of testing and refinement, Opulence evolved into a more intuitive, focused experience, shaped by real user feedback and designed to better support financial confidence from the first tap.
Improvement Updates —
Focused updates addressed usability issues, streamlined user flows, and improved visual consistency—creating a more intuitive, cohesive experience.
Smart Use of Space
Despite being dense with information, the layout doesn’t feel crowded, with effective use of white space and separation between cards enhances readability.
Accessible Visual Contrast
Text stands out clearly against backgrounds, with solid contrast between type, icons, and UI elements, improving accessibility and visual clarity.
Focused Navigation
The updated bottom navigation now includes clear labels beneath each icon, improving accessibility and helping users confidently navigate key sections of the app.
Improvement Updates —
Focused updates addressed usability issues, streamlined user flows, and improved visual consistency—creating a more intuitive, cohesive experience.
Refined Visual Identity
The deep blue gradient evokes calm and trust, while the subtle dot patterns add a sleek, tech-forward feel—symbolizing the user's connection to their financial future.
Clear Financial Overview at a Glance
Key figures like balance, expenses, and leftovers are clearly prioritized, while daily breakdowns simplify financial tracking, giving users immediate clarity and control.
Intuitive Calendar View
Daily expenses are seamlessly integrated into the calendar, helping users spot patterns over time. A blue highlight on the current date enhances clarity and keeps users grounded in their financial timeline.
Personalized User Experience
A friendly greeting and custom spending categories create a more human, welcoming experience. Making finance feel personal, not transactional.
See How it’s Done —
Here’s a demonstration clip of how ot add a new transaction
Considerations
Designing For Everyone
Here are a few accessibility-focused improvements that were explored and applied to help make the platform more usable for everyone.
High Contrast
Text and icons contrast well against their backgrounds, improving legibility for users with low vision or color blindness.
Screen Reader
Ensure all elements are keyboard-accessible, screen reader-friendly, and labeled for easy navigation for users with visual impairments.
Simplified Navigation
Use clear icon labels and well-structured data to improve clarity and ease of use.
Reflection
Project Takeaways
Balance
This project taught me to balance simplicity and depth while prioritizing user needs. Testing revealed key improvements in navigation, savings tracking, and accessibility.
Clean & Reflective
Intuitive design and clear insights help make budgeting feel empowering. Continued refinements will improve feature access and personalization.
Next Steps
With more time and resource I would loved to have explored enhancing personalization features, and conducted further usability testing.
final notes
Lessons Learned
This project taught me how thoughtful design can shift user mindset—turning financial tasks from overwhelming to empowering. Through testing, iteration, and attention to accessibility, I learned the importance of clarity, empathy, and user trust in building meaningful digital experiences
