Bacon
A privacy-forward subscription
app advancing financial literacy
B2C Personal Finance Mobile App
Exploratory | Prototype |Solo Work
Financial overwhelm is the new normal among Millenials, GenZers, and beyond.
Beyond the fact that inflation and housing prices have far outpaced growth in median income for several decades, it is now more complicated than ever to keep track of spending, saving, investments, and liabilities - and to know how to pull it all off in just the right way that banks might award you a good credit score.
Jargon abounds, intimidating regular people and making it harder to navigate financial stability and wealth building.
On top of this, there’s the feeling of being watched and your data profiled; one false move could decide whether you stick a mortgage or not.
“Will checking my credit score negatively affect my credit score?” Likely yes...
People need a tool that can put them at ease, that won’t sell their data, and that can offer a window into the cloistered knowledge of trust fund babies the world over.
Enter, Bacon.
Bacon is a personal finance app that helps users understand their finances; keep track of saving, spending, investment, and debt; optimize behaviour to access credit; and set goals for all of these areas.
As a subscription app, Bacon will never sell your data, meaning that the user can rest assured that they aren’t making a faustian bargain by using the platform.
The app features overview pages with interfaces that are shaped to implicitly explain topics to the user. The Bacon logo glows when a user is using or configuring pages, prompting them to read explainer blog articles. A dedicated blog flow chart clusters blog pages by topic.
Centralizing these services and making them accessible should be a godsend to many bewildered savers and investors in South Africa, making financial success accessible and unintimidating.
Branding
Imagine if users felt informed and empowered to improve their finances - like Duolingo but for personal finance goals and literacy - making personal finance delightful and game-like.
An approachable, playful, motivating, and tasty name promises that you can “Bring home the bacon!”
User Research
Interviews
User interviews were conducted with 5 individuals who have used personal finance apps.
Respondents were selected based on their age and prioir use of a finance app. One respondent worked in finance, had an advanced degree in economics, and was interested in accessibility, despite not being within the target audience.
Participants were asked about their experiences using these apps, the tools they use most frequently, whether they experience any anxiety when it comes to managing their money, whether there are elements of apps which they use more or less frequently than others, and whether there are any tools they wish a financial app could provide.
Participants were then given a list of topics and asked to what extent they understood them, and how best to manage them (for example, credit card use, payments, and the impact of both of these on credit score; and data privacy relating to mortgages, car loans, or insurance). They were also asked to add items to the list, particularly topics which confused them or gave them anxiety in planning for their futures and managing their financial goals.
Participants were then asked to rank a set of features and to add comments or modifications to the feature descriptions.
Some Research Insights and a Blog Case Study
A blog is integrated into the app and is one of its unique selling points. The blog provides well-written, demystifying, explainers on subjects that are often anxiety inducing. It also provides recommendations for data privacy when navigating finance. Blog topics will include credit score (including its fraught history and fallibility) and how to optimise behaviour to optimise score. Other topics may include how to safeguard privacy when banking, how loans and mortgages are typically adjudicated, and practical information that is often assumed knowledge within communities of relative priviledge.
Research for the blog has been essential for the shaping of the user experience of the app overall. For example, including a “Net Wealth” overview page, which has two columns of data, assets and liabilities, implicitly defines “Net Wealth” as the difference between these two. This UX is distinct from competitor apps, which list accounts haphazardly with extraneous information which could instead be collapsed and expanded if the user is interested.
Blogs are USPs for several other leading apps. They have the potential to cultivate a high degree of loyalty among app subscribers, if executed well and if the information is genuinely empowering to users.
For example, the period tracker Clue, partners with researchers and users to provide users with evolving scientific research and to conduct new research on female reproductive health. The blog meets an important gap in public health education by providing blog articles written by researchers and science communuicators.
They also encourage buy-in by assuring users that their data will be used solely to advance scientific research on the female reproductive system. This topic has been structurally understudied and is sorely lacking in the data necessary for robust research. Widely experienced conditions such as PCOS or endometriosis might finally become treatable or easy to diagnose with enough data and research.
Clue guarantees users that their data will never be available to governments or institutions which could, in the future or at present, use it as the basis for gender discrimination, the infringement of their rights, or reproductive health policing. Given evolving standards and laws relating to privacy and data usage, assuring customers that the platform both shares a mission with the client and acts in their best interests regading their sensitive information goes a long way in cultivating trust and brand loyalty.
Similar brand-loyalty and trust is possible within the space of personal finance.
For example, the period tracker Clue, partners with researchers and users to provide users with evolving scientific research and to conduct new research on female reproductive health. The blog meets an important gap in public health education by providing blog articles written by researchers and science communuicators.
They also encourage buy-in by assuring users that their data will be used solely to advance scientific research on the female reproductive system. This topic has been structurally understudied and is sorely lacking in the data necessary for robust research. Widely experienced conditions such as PCOS or endometriosis might finally become treatable or easy to diagnose with enough data and research.
Clue guarantees users that their data will never be available to governments or institutions which could, in the future or at present, use it as the basis for gender discrimination, the infringement of their rights, or reproductive health policing. Given evolving standards and laws relating to privacy and data usage, assuring customers that the platform both shares a mission with the client and acts in their best interests regading their sensitive information goes a long way in cultivating trust and brand loyalty.
Similar brand-loyalty and trust is possible within the space of personal finance.
Dashboard Feature Prioritisation
Based on the user research, features were ranked and fleshed out and compiled into a feature prioritisation table.
Respondents ranked expense tracking, goal setting and projections, credit score optimization, small investments, and a blog as the most important features for the app to contain. They cited anxiety around credit score and investment as important areas to be covered in both the blog and functionality of the app.
Users wished to gain experience making small investments to learn the logistics of the process. They said that they may or may not wish to use an app like this in the future to perform investing, depeding on how it took shape. In the interim, their primary goal was to feel less intimidated by the process, for both local and international investments.
Respondents shared that credit score information could interlock well with the expense and goal-setting areas of the app or dashboard. They feared that their expense types and balances were being used to shape their credit score, although they had no real information to go by. Some expressed anxiety that their personal purchases were being used to shape a risk profile and felt that this reduced their personal spending freedom and placed pressure on them to spend according to the vague expectations of banks.
One responded expressed exasperation that they had struggled to secure a home loan because they had saved and avoided debt. She shared that while this should show that she is a responsible spender, the banks used this to reject her application because she had not taken on debt and therefore proven her ability to pay back debt.Both of these respondents wondered how banks adjudicated these matters before the existence of credit cards, finding current practices unfair.
Another respondent shared that he earned exceedingly well as a freelancer and although his finances were generous (more secure than many more typical employees of large companies) his contract type caused several banks to insist on unfavorable loan terms when he tried to buy a car.
Many respondents expressed that if they could they would shelter their private spending information from banks, censoring what they spent on in bank statements while leaving the starting and closing account balances, which is what banks ostensibly were looking for. However, they didn’t know what rights they had and how to go about this.
Others felt that they had experienced significant anxiety relating to finances, but could not think of or express them on the spot. They suggested that the app prioritise the functionality of receiving feedback or suggestions for blog topics. They also expressed that if their topics were taken seriously this would make them feel that they were a part of a community and that they would feel more loyal and more willing to pay for the app as an ongoing subscription.
Another respondent shared that he earned exceedingly well as a freelancer and although his finances were generous (more secure than many more typical employees of large companies) his contract type caused several banks to insist on unfavorable loan terms when he tried to buy a car.
Many respondents expressed that if they could they would shelter their private spending information from banks, censoring what they spent on in bank statements while leaving the starting and closing account balances, which is what banks ostensibly were looking for. However, they didn’t know what rights they had and how to go about this.
Others felt that they had experienced significant anxiety relating to finances, but could not think of or express them on the spot. They suggested that the app prioritise the functionality of receiving feedback or suggestions for blog topics. They also expressed that if their topics were taken seriously this would make them feel that they were a part of a community and that they would feel more loyal and more willing to pay for the app as an ongoing subscription.
Low Fidelity Mockup
Dashboard
A dashboard with the top 5 features was sketched by hand and then developed within Figma.
Configuring a Goal and Seeing a Blog Article
The user flow for goal-setting was wireframed along with the prompt to read an applicable blog article.
High Fidelity Mockup
Following these tests, the results were analysed and the wireframe was modified to reflect the insights.
Users shared that the overall functionality of the application could be sketched out with an introduction more effectively. Many conceded that they tended to skip tutorials however, and thought that the logic and primary functionality of the app should be legible in the structure of the home page and the primary menu.
A Figma design system was developed for the application in the process of creating the high fidelity mockup.
User Testing
The mockup was shown to 2 volunteers. They were asked to perform a task and to narrate their feelings, observations, challenges, and experiences while performing the task. The tests were screen and audio recorded, compiled, and analysed.
Respondents appreciated the verbal descriptions on the overview pages, particularly that they emphasized successes even when goals were not met, the market was down, or their balances decreased.
A respondent named Joanne shared that he would like to see the area of the app relating to inconsistent income fleshed out with tools and means of setting goals based on projections. He remarked that what we consider typical jobs, with regular paychecks, are increasingly being replaced with freelancing.
Stefan discussed the extent to which taxes ought to feature within the app. He suggested that the current features (where tax data is fed into the app and aggregated for the user) are likely the most streamlined way of meeting basic user needs. He argued that this could be a promising avenue for expansion further down the line, but ultimately that it would require significant resources which would not make it feasible within the early stages of the app’s development.
Takeaways
The project has significant promise as it develops novel selling points among competitors: privacy and a user-oriented blog. The next iteration of the app will flesh out the variable income features (projections, tailored goals, and savings).