Overview

Mint is a personal finance management tool produced by Intuit, Inc. Mint brings together everything from spending, balances, and budgets to your credit score and more. Mint’s Money Spotlights was a campaign designed to spotlight real people and real financial journeys—bringing emotional depth and relatability to personal finance. Money Spotlights was a premium feature that dove into their spending habits in the form of budgeting, spending projections vs. actuals, breakdowns and comparisons of spending. It shows users where their money is working—or not working—for them.

My Role

As a Product Designer on the team, I helped with the design of the Money Spotlights experience, working closely with the product team. I was tasked with product thinking and product vision. I helped interview a number of users to discover insights that would lead to the feature’s improved look and behavior.

Problem

Mint is a powerful financial tool, but its tone skewed clinical at times. We saw an opportunity to highlight the emotional side of money—how people save, spend, and struggle in different ways—and to make Mint feel more human and inclusive. The introduction of Money Spotlights brought users' money to life in ways that they hadn’t experienced before. However, after initial release, research revealed the feature was hard to find, and while data visualization made it easier to see a spending snapshot, users wanted deeper insight into their money with more granular information and greater interactivity. How can we provide a consumable snapshot into users' money, giving them deeper insight into their finances? We wanted to bring a fresh design that told the story of our users' financial journey, while feeling integrated into Mint as well as easily discoverable.

Goals

• Create a design that stands out, is easy to navigate and easy to discover

• Make financial stories easy to read, navigate and feeling more intuitive

• Allow for scalable access for users to get as granular as they want with their finances

Outcome

The updated experience included new functionality like drop downs and filters, as well as the creation of a premium hub highlighting the new feature and offering tutorial walkthroughs to demonstrate to users how the improved feature works. We also leveraged successful visual and behavioral language from other elements within the app to make it feel more cohesive and intuitive.

• 3x increase in average time spent on Spotlight pages

• +30% engagement from Mint users via in-app promotions

• Positive sentiment in qualitative feedback: users said it “made money feel more personal”