Aureus

Aureus is an financial assistance app designed to help users manage and grow their skills in saving, investing, spedning, and more. Designed to be simple to use for all users of all levels of financial literacy, Aureus is perfect for all levels of knowledge. It is the goal of the app to give users the confidence to take control of their finances and make informed decisions about their money.

Features

The app is separated into multiple sections, each with a unique purpose to help develop financial responsibility. Beyond the overview screen, which shows a view of all your connected accounts and their value, there are three more sections: lessons, health, and bills.

The lessons section is designed to help users learn about various financial topics, such as budgeting, saving, and investing. Each lesson is broken down into bite-sized chunks, making it easy to digest. Users have a choice on watching videos or reading an article to learn. A small quiz will be at the end of each lesson to solidify the user's knowledge. They can then track their progress and earn rewards for completing lessons and being consistent.

The health section is built to analyze your finances and give you suggestions as to what your options are to improve your monetary health and get yourself into a better economic position. For example, if you are a recnet grad with student loans to pay off, the app can suggest refinancing options, or even provide tips on how to budget effectively to pay off your loans faster. This section can also help you build an effective financial portfolio The app uses machine learning to analyze your spending habits and provide personalized recommendations tailored to your financial situation. Importantly, Aureus will never suggest that you take any particular action with your money, and will merely tell you what your options are and what those who were once in your situation have done.

In the bills section, you can track your repeating payments and subscriptions. Not only does this provide you with a clear view of what you're paying for each month, but it also allows you to cancel these subscriptions from the app itself. In situations where that's not possible, links to the relevant pages of the service are provided to make the process as easy as possible. This section also provides its own rewards for paying down bills and debt, encouraging good financial habits.

The rewards mentioned previoously are a key part of the app. Using gamification, the rewards system encourages users to complete lessons, pay down bills, and improve their financial health. You can earn ribbons and trophies to show off on your profile. Earning a lot of rewards is a sign to the user that they are growing and becoming a master of their financial journey.

Spending goals

Profile view

Example of a reward

Design Tenets

In order to align with the goals of the app, Aureus required a design system focused around a few key principles:

• Easy to read and understand
• Accessible to all users
• Easily digestible
• Responsive
• Consistent

Now it's one thing to have these principles, but it's another to actually implement them, so let's get into how I turned each other these into tangible design choices in the app.

In order to ensure the app is readable, I first ensured that high contrast meeting WCAG standards was used on all text and that, in areas where contrast was lower, used bigger text. You can see in the screenshots below that the high contrast default theme is very easy to read even from a distance and on a small device. Drop shadows on text are used on lower contrast themes to help with readability.

Aureus overview screen

To facilitate accessibility, I also added additional features to make the app even easier to use. You can customize the theme of the app to match your preferences and make it easier for you to see content, with an additional high-contrast mode that is able to be swtiched to on the very first onboarding screen. The app also responds to OS-level text scaling and dark mode making it even more responsive to user preferences.

To make the app digestible and straightforward, I included an onboarding section for new users that let's them set essential settings and walks them through the core features of the app. I also added screens that explain in detail the various actions you can take and letting you confirm before taking them.

Cancelling a subscription

Responsivenss is a two-way street. You need to make it so what the user wants, they get as soon as possible, but they also need to know that what they've done is what they want. If you don't communicate back to them about what they're doing, they may make a mistake, and in an app that deals with finances it's especially important to avoid that. To facilitate this, all actions are performed as soon as the user requests them, with visibile feedback to communicate to the user that what they want is being done. When someone hits the "cancel subscription" button, that is exactly what happens. Something simple like a checkmark popping up is enough to communciate to our user that what they wanted was achieved, which is a must when it comes to something like cancelling a bill or making an investment. If for some reason that action can't be performed, the user is informed why and what steps they can take to fix it.

To maintain consistency, I used two design systems meant to mimic the overall feeling of the iOS and Android operating systems while keeping the apps personal aesthetic. The iOS designs implement the San Francisco font and uses other stock iOS iconography when possible. As for Android, Google's Material Design 3 was the baseline, following its rigid standards for text, elevation, iconography, and color. Embracing these design systems ensure the absolute highest amount of consistency, making the app just as natural feeling to use as the OS it is installed on. Additionally, the design throughout all screens and components is similar, meaning that once you understand how one section of Aureus functions, the rest will be very easy to pick up.

Aureus on iOS

Aureus on Android

Prototype

Below is the Figma prototype for Aureus. It is fully interactive and demonstrates some of the basic workflows available to you.