Understanding the challenge
Managing money can often feel overwhelming. Many users experience anxiety around spending, budgeting, and staying in control of their finances. Traditional banking apps tend to prioritise functionality over emotional experience, which can leave users feeling stressed rather than supported. The challenge is to reduce this financial anxiety while still empowering users to make informed decisions.
For Monzo’s Calmer Money concept, the core problem is not just about helping users track their finances, but giving them the support they need and reshaping their emotional relationship with money.
Designing a seamless experience
I begin by mind mapping ideas to explore and organise my initial thoughts, followed by user interviews to understand the users needs and expectations. I then support my approach with research into facts, statistics, and competitors to build a strong foundation. From this I move into sketching, building a user story map, and moving into mid fidelity continuously testing with users and refining based on their feedback. In the end I always make sure my users are 100% happy with the end result and I complete my experience.
Ideation & Iteration
I start by highlighting and annotating the brief, summarising the key points to ensure I fully understand the task. I then mind map my ideas to explore a wide range of possible directions. From this, I develop a clear plan and initial concept. I then gather feedback to refine and strengthen the idea before moving forward.
I conducted primary research through user interviews to understand how people manage their money and how they feel when using banking apps like Monzo. This gave me direct insights into user behaviours, goals, and frustrations, particularly around budgeting and financial stress. For secondary research, I explored existing data, statistics, and competitor apps to understand the wider market and user expectations. Combining both approaches helped me identify what works well, where users face challenges, and opportunities to create a calmer, more supportive money management experience.
I began by looking into the Monzo app and sketching out ideas to explore different ways to present information and features. This helped me quickly visualise multiple approaches and experiment with layout and flow. Building on these sketches, I created wireframes to further refine the structure, carefully considering visual hierarchy and the placement of key elements.
I then moved onto creating mid fidelity designs, adding more detail to the wireframes and defining layout, hierarchy, and interactions more clearly. At this stage I experimented with different colours, patterns, buttons and the overall UI. This stage helps me test how information is organised and how users might navigate the app. I completed user tests throughout mid fidelity to ensure it met the users wants and needs, and to gather feedback to make any changes. I make sure my user is 100% happy before I finalise the design.
High Fidelity
This is the final outcome of the 'Calmer Money' feature for Monzo, and I’m really pleased with how it turned out. User feedback highlighted that the experience felt as though they were already within the Monzo app, which was exactly the level of familiarity and integration I aimed to achieve.
The feature introduces tools that provide meaningful support, such as offering helpful financial insights, identifying subscriptions that could be cancelled and reallocating that money more effectively, showing a clear 'safe to spend' amount after bills, and allowing users to build an emergency fund for added reassurance.
At its core, the problem I identified was that people are seeking relationships with brands that feel less transactional and more supportive. This design responds to that need by creating a more empathetic and user focused banking experience.
Here are just a few of the screens, but to see the full prototype please click below!
