Helping people build financial confidence with AI

About the product

WInvest helps people build financial confidence through education, personalised guidance and AI-driven support across budgeting, spending and investing. The product began focused on women's financial confidence and later broadened to a wider audience.

Research

What we heard

I designed from user research the team gathered. It surfaced recurring barriers: lack of education, lack of control, misinformation, fear of risk, no habits and low confidence. These shaped the whole product structure.

• “I feel like I'm losing an opportunity. I don't have the information or the security to do something different.” — lack of education
• “I don't understand why we make so much money, yet still struggle with debt. Where is it going?” — lack of control
• “I was getting fragmented information from different people, so it was hard to know what to do.” — misinformation
• “I didn't feel confident doing it. It takes a lot of effort to look at things.” — low confidence

Setting the foundations

Structuring the product

With the team I ran a cross-functional workshop to define the app's goals and areas of engagement, and identified target personas. I turned the research into a clear model: guide users from understanding money, to managing it, to acting with confidence — the structure the whole product is built on.

The map below shows the full journey I defined — from first questionnaire to daily use — so every flow had a clear job before any screen was designed.

AI assistant

Turning data into plain-language guidance

Generic finance advice doesn't build confidence. I designed a conversational AI assistant that interprets a user's situation and responds with personalised, plain-language guidance — a supportive companion rather than a lecture. The tone was deliberately warm; research showed a collaborative voice worked better than an instructive one for this audience.

What I designed

• A conversational assistant that answers real money questions
• Personalised suggestions the user can choose to explore
• A consistent, supportive tone across the whole experience

Control, track and grow

Seeing the whole picture and where it's going

Users connect their accounts for a real-time view of their money, set custom spending ratios across essentials, non-essentials and future investments, and see a projection of their net worth over time. The projection makes an abstract goal tangible: it updates as people adjust how they split their money.

What I designed

• A net-worth projection that responds to the user's choices
• Custom spending ratios with automatic transaction categorisation
• Goal tracking with clear, motivating progress

Education

Learning in bite-size steps

Financial confidence starts with understanding, so I designed the learning experience to teach in small, digestible steps rather than overwhelming users with information. Short lessons, plain language, and progress that builds over time turn a daunting topic into something approachable.

The game

Learning money through play

To make financial decisions less intimidating, I designed a game that lets people practise real-life money situations in a safe, low-stakes way. It turns abstract concepts into decisions users can feel the consequences of, reinforcing the learning elsewhere in the app.

What I designed

• Scenario-based decisions drawn from real financial situations
• Clear feedback that connects choices to outcomes
• A playful visual language that keeps a serious topic light

Design system

A scalable system built from scratch

As founding designer I built WInvest's design system from scratch: a modular, scalable component library with a defined colour, type and spacing system. I built it alongside the product so a small team could ship consistently and add features without rebuilding, and documented it so design and engineering shared one source of truth. It's the ways-of-working foundation that kept a fast-growing app coherent.

What I built

• A reusable, documented component library
• A defined colour, type and spacing system
• States and edge cases considered for each component
• A foundation the team could extend without redesigning

Visual identity

Making finance feel approachable

I gave WInvest a bright, energetic visual identity to counter how intimidating finance can feel. Vibrant colour, friendly type and a warm illustrative style make the product feel welcoming and human rather than corporate. Tone of voice mattered just as much: I shaped the language across the whole app to be plain, supportive and jargon-free, so every screen and every AI response sounds like a helpful friend rather than a bank.

Outcome

A complete product, shipped

I took WInvest from research to a launched, customer-facing iOS app as founding designer, owning the full experience: the research-led product vision, onboarding, the AI assistant, tracking and projection, learning content, the game, the visual identity and the design system. It's a native app that turns a complex, intimidating problem — managing money across budgeting, spending and investing — into something approachable, built on a system designed to scale. WInvest is live on the App Store.

What I'd measure next

• Activation through the first goal set
• Week-four retention
• Engagement with the AI assistant and learning content

Key takeaways

• For an intimidating topic, tone and approachability do as much as features. The supportive AI voice, validated in research, shaped every interaction.
• Making the future tangible drives action. The net-worth projection turned an abstract goal into something people could see and adjust.
• Building the design system alongside the product kept a fast-growing app coherent without slowing delivery.