Wealthify
UI & UX Design - FinTech
Behavioural Design
Wealthify is a speculative design project that reimagines financial planning apps from an emotional wellness lens. Unlike most tools focused on numbers and outcomes, Wealthify focuses on the why behind the money behaviours — addressing avoidance, shame, and guilt while fostering empowerment, reflection, and control. Built as part of a university module, the project unpacks complex psychological relationships with money to inform better UX decisions.
Story
The emotional weight of financial planning is often overlooked in product design. Existing apps focus on outcome-driven planning: budgets, investment charts, auto-saving. But for many users — especially young earners and first-generation planners — the emotional barriers come first. Wealthify was born to explore this gap, and ask: What would a money app look like if it cared how I feel before telling me what to do?
The Problem
How might we reimagine finance tools to prioritise emotional health and long-term self-awareness over rigid goal-setting and data overload?
Story
Research Insights
The research began with qualitative interviews and emotion mapping exercises across 8 participants from different income and financial confidence backgrounds.
Key Insights:
Avoidance is common: users delay opening money apps due to fear of negative feedback.
Lack of context leads to shame: users don’t always need reminders — they need reassurance and reflection.
Emotions fluctuate by phase: stress when starting, guilt when failing, pride when recovering.
No one-size-fits-all: the same financial pattern can mean different things to different people.
These insights led to 3 behaviour-driven personas: The Avoider, The Overcompensator, and The Rebooter.
Story
Design Process
Empathise — Ran emotional journey exercises to identify micro-moments of emotional charge.
Define — Created themes around emotional blockers and motivators.
Ideate — Sketched speculative flows of a product that encourages slow, mindful interactions.
Prototype — Developed mid-fidelity screens with unique UX writing and navigation logic.
Test — Performed reflective journaling and task-based testing on tone, sequence, and user comfort.
Story
Key Solutions & Features
Feel-first onboarding: Users begin with emotional self-reflection prompts before goal creation.
Non-linear goal paths: Users can pause, reframe, or reset a goal without penalty.
Supportive feedback loops: Calming affirmations, gentle progress updates, and neutral language.
Financial journaling tool: Users can attach emotion tags or notes to their spending insights.
Tone-first UX writing: Microcopy designed to reduce shame and invite self-kindness.
Story
Impact & Reflections
Wealthify challenged conventional wisdom about how we design for finance. It proved that emotional design isn’t limited to wellness apps — it belongs in fintech too. The experience of designing this taught me how to listen to silence in research, follow emotion trails, and resist default design patterns in favour of human nuance.
Wealthify
UI & UX Design - FinTech
Behavioural Design
Wealthify is a speculative design project that reimagines financial planning apps from an emotional wellness lens. Unlike most tools focused on numbers and outcomes, Wealthify focuses on the why behind the money behaviours — addressing avoidance, shame, and guilt while fostering empowerment, reflection, and control. Built as part of a university module, the project unpacks complex psychological relationships with money to inform better UX decisions.
Story
The emotional weight of financial planning is often overlooked in product design. Existing apps focus on outcome-driven planning: budgets, investment charts, auto-saving. But for many users — especially young earners and first-generation planners — the emotional barriers come first. Wealthify was born to explore this gap, and ask: What would a money app look like if it cared how I feel before telling me what to do?
The Problem
How might we reimagine finance tools to prioritise emotional health and long-term self-awareness over rigid goal-setting and data overload?
Story
Research Insights
The research began with qualitative interviews and emotion mapping exercises across 8 participants from different income and financial confidence backgrounds.
Key Insights:
Avoidance is common: users delay opening money apps due to fear of negative feedback.
Lack of context leads to shame: users don’t always need reminders — they need reassurance and reflection.
Emotions fluctuate by phase: stress when starting, guilt when failing, pride when recovering.
No one-size-fits-all: the same financial pattern can mean different things to different people.
These insights led to 3 behaviour-driven personas: The Avoider, The Overcompensator, and The Rebooter.
Story
Design Process
Empathise — Ran emotional journey exercises to identify micro-moments of emotional charge.
Define — Created themes around emotional blockers and motivators.
Ideate — Sketched speculative flows of a product that encourages slow, mindful interactions.
Prototype — Developed mid-fidelity screens with unique UX writing and navigation logic.
Test — Performed reflective journaling and task-based testing on tone, sequence, and user comfort.
Story
Key Solutions & Features
Feel-first onboarding: Users begin with emotional self-reflection prompts before goal creation.
Non-linear goal paths: Users can pause, reframe, or reset a goal without penalty.
Supportive feedback loops: Calming affirmations, gentle progress updates, and neutral language.
Financial journaling tool: Users can attach emotion tags or notes to their spending insights.
Tone-first UX writing: Microcopy designed to reduce shame and invite self-kindness.
Story
Impact & Reflections
Wealthify challenged conventional wisdom about how we design for finance. It proved that emotional design isn’t limited to wellness apps — it belongs in fintech too. The experience of designing this taught me how to listen to silence in research, follow emotion trails, and resist default design patterns in favour of human nuance.
