Figures

Meet Figures—your all-in-one financial companion for budgeting, debt management, and smarter spending. Designed for young adults, Figures goes beyond tracking expenses by offering personalized strategies and an AI chat feature to guide intentional financial decisions. Whether tackling student debt or improving savings habits, Figures helps you stay accountable and in control. Say goodbye to financial stress and hello to confidence with Figures.

Challenge

As a team, we explored the financial challenges young adults face, particularly in managing debt and
savings. With the average student loan debt at $37,338 and 31% of Gen Z lacking a savings account, there is a clear need for a seamless and organized system. Young adults (18-25) often struggle with budgeting and financial planning, yet user-friendly apps to support their goals are lacking. Through collaboration, our group worked together to address this gap by designing a solution that empowers young adults to take control of their finances.

Solution

Our collective response is a financial management
app designed to help young adults take control of their money. Through teamwork, we developed a solution that assists with managing debt, future expenses, savings, and budgets while preventing unnecessary purchases. A key feature is an AI chat that engages
with users to evaluate spending decisions, keeping them informed and accountable in meaningful ways.
By combining our skills and ideas, we created an
app that empowers young adults to build healthier financial habits.

Design Process

Empathize

Define

Ideate

Prototype (lo-fi) & Test

Prototype (hi-fi) & Test

User Research:
We conducted user interviews to better understand our target group’s backgrounds, behaviors, decisions, and financial goals.

Interviews

Empathy Maps

Thematic Analysis

Financial Stability:
Users need trackable and accessible data to feel more stable and confident in their finances.

Empathize

Financial Management:
Users need time-keeping and automated features to alleviate the burden of constant financial management.

Savings:
Users need the ability to sub-categorize their savings to make
the total balance more meaningful to them.

Purchasing Behavior:
Users need to be able to make informed purchase decisions using readily available data.

Debt:
Users need a familiar interface to track their debt progress in the same way they would their budget and savings progress.

Personas:
The define stage of research involves analyzing user insights to identify key patterns, which are then synthesized into personas that represent the target audience’s needs, behaviors, and pain points.

DEFINE

User Journey Mapping:
In this we visualized the steps users would take to achieve a goal, identifying pain points, motivations, and opportunities to enhance their experience.

Danny

Sav

Izzy

How Might We?:
We used the "How Might We" stage in ideation to reframe challenges as opportunities, turning user insights into actionable problem statements that drive creative solutions.

Key Takeaways:

Allow users to customize
- their budget categories (such as entertainment, food, etc) by choosing their own icons, names, and even colors.
- savings goals with icons of the item, how much is left to go, etc.

IDEATE

Creative Matrix:
We used a creative matrix to generate diverse ideas by intersecting user needs with potential solutions, encouraging innovative thinking and exploring multiple approaches to a problem.

How might we encourage users to make informed decisions based on their financial insights?

How might we allow users to customize their experience to continue budgeting?

How might we encourage users to make progress on their financial goals?

How might we assist users’ with understanding their past and future purchases?