Bella PFM

Personal Finance Management research

Goals

With the Open Finance era in Brazil, the goal is to allow people to have more control over their finances, make plans, and show them the importance of financial organization. Bella aims to understand people's financial behavior based on their usage and suggest better ways to spend or save money.

Problems

There have always been major problems in Brazil such as economic and socio-political issues. After the pandemic, many people did not have enough money to even feed themselves, let alone save. With this in mind, we also face problems such as the taboo of talking about money, a lack of financial education in the country, and poor spending habits, such as spending more than one earns.

Solution

To conduct in-depth research on behavioral economics, we spoke to people to understand how they spend and save money. As a design team, we understood that behavioral design could be effective in persuading people for a good cause. We realized that any Personal Finance Management (PFM) tool is based on behavioral change, and that is where we should focus to make a difference.

My Contributions

This product lasted for one and a half years, but unfortunately, it has been discontinued. All the research that I participated in is included on this page. The research was conducted by a team of 5 UX designers and researchers.

Desk research
User jorney based on different Personas
Benchmarks
Final reports

Process

Deskresearch
Benchmark
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Our deliveries during this extensive research process began with conducting three desk research studies to understand the economic problems that people are mostly facing, and how it affects their lives. We also studied people's behaviors and relationship with money. We then delved deeper into understanding how open finance works, how it has been accepted in other countries, and other related information.

Later, we conducted a benchmark study of all the good Personal Finance Management (PFM) tools around the world, along with other applications that use behavioral design as their core. We also included analogous solutions such as Duolingo and Nike Training. With all this information, we could identify gaps and determine how we wanted to build our product.

Process

Personas
User journeys and their maturity level
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We created personas based on the profiles of people we wanted to impact. Essentially, there were four different profiles with distinct goals and needs. We created a journey for each persona to understand what Bella could offer.After this, we created a maturity level for each persona, based on their knowledge about finance. This helped us understand their current situation and goals, and how Bella could help them achieve those goals.

Bella PFM

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