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The user

At the end of each month Xavier looks at his online bank balance and wonders where all his money has gone. Going through the figures it's easy to see where all the big memorable purchases come from but it's hard to determine how the little purchases have added up to such a figure. Xavier wants to keep a better track of his expenditure and better realise where he is really spending all his money.

Xavier needs to be kept motivated to add his expenses as the month goes on. A playful mobile app combined with a subtle "gaming" element would help to ensure that his extra little bit of effort is rewarded. As a result his loyalty to the product would grow and through greater use his perceived product value increase.

The experience

Little Spender has been designed with people like Xavier in mind, allowing him to add his expenses through micro experiences on his mobile device. 10 seconds to launch and add an expense, followed by a quick tilt of the screen to see glance-like visuals of expenses added so far.

Little Spender’s goal is to enable even the most casual of Little Spenders to see where exactly their hard-earned cash goes every month. Along with a bit of fun and simplicity along the way, they’ll hopefully save a little money too.

Key to the user experience is the way in which the user interacts with the application and the speed and ease of data entry and data visualisation. This is driven by the interface’s simplicity utilsing a focusless interface; when adding an expense, the numeric keypad controls the amount, and the directional buttons toggle the expense category (up-down) and sub-category (left-right). Also, a sense of motion in the interface allowed us to provide the user with simple but postive visual reactions to user actions.

With touch-based input devices, it was important to stick with a similar aesthetic for brand consistency, but we needed to ensure that the interface made the most out of the touch interaction model. We opted for a visually appealling and simplistic interface, that invited the user to touch and play with the interactive areas.