Adding a budgeting feature onto Apple Wallet

June 2021 (80 hours)
Tags - UX design, visual design

As an avid user of Apple Wallet, this app saved me tons of time when paying for things online, removing the need to take my wallet when I go out. As I have a few cards attached to it, I struggle to keep my finances centralised. I produced this personal project to improve the current solution based on problems others might have, as well as developing my skills with the iOs design system.

Intro

Using Apple Wallet to help users manage their finances more effectively.

Apple Wallet is the native application for Apple iPhone users to pay using their phone at stores that support NFC contactless payments and websites that support Apple Pay. It can store multiple cards such as debit, credit or prepaid cards.

Problem definition

Currently, there are no features that allow users to keep track of their spending natively within the iOS system.

Some modern banking apps provide good money management and budgeting tools, such as the possibility of rounding up transactions to a savings pot. However, many traditional banking apps are still in a early stage of development, leaving users to manage their finances themselves, using other money budgeting tools, such as Mint and Wallet. However, they still need to dedicate some time to learn how to use budgeting apps.

Research plan

How Apple Pay users keep track of their spending?

The research goal was to understand how Apple Wallet users keep track of their spending, uncovering the artefacts currently used to budget their finances. By learning how users currently use Apple Wallet, we can uncover the problems faced by them and identify where we can add value by implementing money management tools inside the app.
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Budgeting apps also exist, but what are the current problems, pain points or concerns about them? In order to add even more value to users, I analysed the solutions provided by the competitors to see where Wallet stands today. I also compared budgeting apps pinning down any features that could be implemented. To answer these questions:

I performed secondary research to get data about spending habits, financial trends, monetisation, industry standards and regulations.
Competitive research was used to explore current solutions offered by competitors.
User interviews were useful to hear user’s stories about how they track their spending.
Finally, I conducted usability testing to validate the proposed solution.

Secondary and competitive research

The share of iPhones with Apple Pay activated is about 51%.

In September 2020, Apple Pay had about 507 million users around the world* (from 441 million in 2019). The number of non-cash transactions continues to grow* and this can be because of the global pandemic and widespread fear of infection, where many shops stopped accepting cash payments. Apple doesn't charge users or merchants for the use of Apple Pay, however, they receive a small fee from each transaction, roughly around 0.15% or $0.15 for every $100 spent.

Source: Loup Funds and Consultancy.uk

Analysing the competition

Google Pay and Samsung Pay are products that offer the same product, allowing users to pay using the phone. Google Pay is the native Android digital wallet, and in terms of functionalities, is way ahead of the competition, offering features like budget tracking and a centralised view spending by using an API that connects with users' banks to display the spending. Samsung Pay only offers basic functionalities and lacks any additional features.

In 2019, Apple released Apple Card in the US. It offers cash back on transactions, a centralised view of spending, activity, and insights. However, it can only track transactions made using Apple's card.

Most under 30s in the UK use an app to help them budget*. Considering the indirect competitors, these apps focus on budget planning rather than making payments. For this study, I analysed Curve, Plum, Snoop and Emma. They present many useful features such as tracking regular bills for overcharges, offering better deals on broadband or energy suppliers, providing spending insights and setting money on a savings pot automatically by rounding up transactions. You can view the full competitive analysis report here.

Source: Statista

Interview findings

Checking the card balance can be a tedious — and scary — task to people.

During the user interviews, participants based in the UK and US shared details about their experience using Apple Wallet, how they currently budget their spending and keep track of transactions.

Most participants budget using spreadsheets

They enjoy the freedom spreadsheets can have, where they can quickly adjust it to meet their goals of the moment.

Budget planning apps are too strict

Most interviewees tried them, but they think they are difficult to set up and restrict their financial decisions way too much.

Different methods to save

Those who are more budget-conscious tend to obsess checking their bank apps too often or even getting a new card to separate spending, leading to users' anxiety.

Sharply cutting down spending to make ends meet

Those who are less financially worried, have cut down the spending abruptly before payday, which can make the process even more stressful to them.

Interaction design

Functional, personal and social objectives

Using the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework, it was possible to map functional, personal and social objectives to sketch better solutions to the problem at hand and understand what users seek to accomplish the tasks of paying and controlling finances. This document can highlight the rationale of users' decisions and guide the next steps of the process.

Research takeaways

The primary goal was to add a feature without disrupting users.

Users expect to do everything quickly and avoid having to learn how to use new products. It was essential to map out current screens and highlight proposed features in the same ecosystem, minimising disruption.

Considering that users already use Apple Pay daily, the data needed for this feature is already widely available within the current app. The proposed solution needs to ease users' anxiety of knowing how much balance they still have, and if it's okay to continue spending.

Users might steer away from complicated features and there's still some stigma behind budget tracking apps, which can restrict users' decisions and make the process even more traumatising. The idea for this MVP is to add a new feature to add even more value to the existing feature, helping users to make more sustainable financial decisions.

Interaction design

The sitemap below was used to map the existing screens in darker grey and proposed solutions in the lighter grey. The user flows below serve as a complement to interaction design to map potential outcomes and expected actions from users.

Low fidelity wireframes

Before to jumping into the final designs, the Lo-Fi wireframes set the stage for the implemented features and provide enough information to discuss design decisions. Users have asked for an easy way to keep track of how much they already spent, and this info can now be shown directly on the notification centre. The new feature can be accessed when selecting a card, allowing users to check the amount spent on each card.

UI Designs

Using the existing Apple's Human Interface design principles, I reused the current components used on the Wallet app and proposed new features to the new solution, keeping learnability and accessibility in mind. The choice of elements has the goal of proposing a familiar experience to users, using the patterns users already love about the Apple iOs system.

Categorisation

Every transaction now gets automatically categorised based on the transaction name. Expanding the notification shows more details.

Each purchase counts towards a pre-set budget spending. The category can be quickly switched if needed.

Tracking card spending
on the go

Selecting a card in Wallet shows the total cumulative spent. The feature can be accessed by the icon on the top right.

Spending insights

A centralised view of all cards spending available for use on Wallet. Users can configure spending for each budget category.

Reports and settings

Define the frequency of the notifications and easily adjust budgets if needed.

Usability testing

Validating the current solution

Participants took part in a moderated usability testing study, going through the tasks of opening the Wallet app, tracking spending, view and change budgets and using the notification to track spending.

All users could complete the task prompts successfully and I identified some potential navigation problems. You can also view the full usability testing summary.
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One of the most suggested features by users was the capability of adding custom categories. This may seem an excellent solution to sorting transactions but might turn Wallet more difficult to use.

Some participants prefer seeing the categories spending in percentages so they can estimate the budget vs actual spent, others the amount in currency, so they can get an idea of how much is still available to spend in case they’re making a big purchase. By using a toggle, users can now quickly switch between these two options.

Most users got confused when seeing the budgets already pre-defined for their categories during user testing. When opening the Spending Insights tab for the first tab, a one-step onboarding is now shown, taking users directly to where they can set up the budget amounts. A colour code now displays controlled spending in blue and exceeded budgets in red.‍

A change for the better

What’s still left to do

It was interesting to listen to users’ stories and concerns about Wallet during the interview and to see how excited they were to test the new solution during usability testing. Considering the constraints, the proposed solutions were prioritised by recurrence and feasibility, considering the allocated time and purpose of this project to build an MVP. Some other features could be added in the long run, such as:

Connecting Wallet to users bank accounts to track spending without using Wallet. This was one of the first insights when analysing the competitors, but it’s also a complex feature that demands some time exploring the ethics and constraints about gathering bank data from users.
Helping users keeping track of due dates of instalment cards such as Klarna or Clearpay — and predicting those in Apple Wallet.
Considering users were keen to categorise their spending in different categories as the current offered in the app, it might be interesting to explore the use of tags or notes so users can be more organised, as well as offering to search transactions within the app.

Final thoughts

This exercise was a great way to propose solutions to problems, repurposing the existing features. It can be quite tempting to create additional features all the time but even the slight change on Wallet can have an enormous impact on the entire iOs ecosystem.

By keeping these things in mind, the cognitive load to learn how to use an extra feature can be reduced, allowing users to get up to speed quickly without having to complete the onboarding or read any guides.

It would be interesting to test this solution on a bigger group of users to understand the long-term user behaviour and to see how a feature like this can help them spend more consciously.