Designing Mobile Applications for Personal Financial Management: An Exploratory User-Centered Design Study

As our everyday financial interactions become increasingly digital, the abundance of mobile banking applications, methods of electronic payment, and online financial services available to everyday users offer new ways of interacting with money. These digital tools have the potential to transform our understanding of how financial operations occur, as well as how we make sense of our own personal financial information. There is still limited research to guide the design of personal financial management (PFM) tools and how to better support our digital financial interactions. While existing studies provide much-needed conceptual guidance and elaboration of contextual factors, there are still few studies that derive lessons from engaging in a user-centered design process that includes the evaluation of digital prototypes and explore the interactional challenges in designing tools for the mobile context. In this chapter we present an exploratory study in which we take a user-centered approach to developing and evaluating a digital prototype mobile application for PFM. We present our design decisions, discuss the usability implications of those decisions, and suggest ways in which future tools could be enhanced.