Role
Designer
App Developer
Contribution
UX Design
UI Design
Design Systems
Branding
Coding
Year
2018 – ongoing
Links
What is Deep Pockets?
Deep pockets is a personal budget tracking mobile app.
What is unique about Deep Pockets?
Deep Pockets aims to be the most EASY to use app of them all. Yes, not more not less. As easy as a todo list!
Scroll down to find out more about the development of this project.
The product mission & vision
Yes, every product ideally should have some sort of mission and vision. This ensures the product has focus and helps in decision making when it comes to features. Here they are!
Vision
Budget tracking made easy!
Yes, like the reminders app, but for budgeting.
Mission
We aim to radically simply budget tracking for every household while keeping their data private at all times.
Initial Sketches
The ideation started with just a few scribbles, pen and paper, nothing fancy. At this stage anything more than low fidelity sketches increases the risk of investing time in artifacts that are later thrown away anyway.
Design principles
Focusing the design is crucial for saving time later during the process. In order to do this we can use different tools like Personas or Design Principles.
Here are the principles this app was design on.
Speed
“Time is money”, so the users’s time is an expensive commodity. Everything should be optimized for speed, especially when the user inputs data.
Trust
The app should feel solid also from the design standpoint. User will received immediate feedback following any action, visual and where possible haptic.
Simplicity
Nobody reads the manual and best apps don’t have a manual. App features should be self explanatory and extremely easy to understand.
Ease of use
Compared to the competition, this app aims to be the best in class when it comes to user friendliness.
UI Exploration – “Home” Screen
Design is a process and does not happen over night. The initial idea evolves over time and gets refined based on USER feedback and research.
Here is a small sample showing the evolution of the main screen of this application as it went through different versions.
UI Exploration – “Add Expense” Screen
The entire app went through a process of optimization and simplification. User session after user session added enough data in order to de-risk the design and lower the actual development time.
Here is how the “add expense” screen design was simplified following user feedback.
UX Exploration
App flows are developed, ideas are compared and measured.
Everything starts to take shape and come together: screens layouts, information architecture, edge cases, empty states.
Icon Ideation
Low fidelity handmade sketches of the initial icon idea. Always start with the lowest effort possible in order to explore the most versions.
Icon Design Exploration
The icons design exploration included the creation of several version of the icon.
Selected app icon
From all the solutions, the final idea had been chosen. This had the highest score.
The section criteria included the following requirements:
- easy to recognize
- simple
- trustworthy
- familiar
- inviting
- fresh and clean
The final result
This is how the app looks like after everything is ready and implemented.
