Chase Budget Tool

Most Americans find budgeting hard
76% of Americans have concerns about creating a budget that’s flexible and realistic for how they live. (Source)

No easy way to budget in Chase
Chase did not have a unified location to track income and spending across customers’ accounts, which made it hard to understand their spending habits over time and ultimately cut down.

Approach

How do we create a personalized budgeting tool that allows one to easily monitor and cut down their spending over time?

Archetype: Reactives

1 of 3 archetypes summarized by UX researcher focused on Chase’s Goals and Financial Management initiative

Archetype: Co-actives

Objectives

Jobs to be done

• There was no web experience prior to my involvement, which started 2 weeks (1 sprint) before the start of the grooming schedule

• The majority of usability testing sessions were focused upon the spend pacing feature due to stakeholder interest

• Designs delivered needed to go through approval processes with internal platform design and product teams (web and mobile), legal counsel, and accessibility team

• Designs delivered were caught between the migration between the old to new design systems, which caused significant issues during the delivery phase.

Solution

The total amount for each category (i.e. income, bills, transfers to savings/investments) is calculated with the recurring transactions from the user’s checking accounts and credit cards. The user can choose to edit their list of transactions to calculate a new amount.

Recurrence is defined as:

• Consistent posted date (i.e. every 1st of the month)

• Consistent deposited/paid/transferred source

• Consistent inbound or outgoing amount (auto-adjusts this month’s projection based on the previous month’s actual amount posted)

• A minimum of 3 months frequency (i.e. Jan 1, Feb 1, Mar 1)

Once the user has verified their monthly income, bills and transfers, they get to review their monthly budget amount (i.e. discretionary spending) before confirming.

Budget dashboard during the beginning of the month

Users can see their:

• The remaining budget amount (i.e. on dining out, buying a gift, etc.) for the rest of the days left in the month

• Available balance(s) across the user’s checking accounts to ensure they have enough cash cushion to cover bills and transfers before potentially spending or saving

• Income, bills and transfer amounts that are already occurred v.s. upcoming for the month

The spend pacer shows:

• The potential savings users could have by spending less, or

• The amount we recommend they stay under to stay within their budget

Budget dashboard during the middle of the month (pacer off)

As users earn income, pay their bills, and transfer money towards their savings throughout the month, we keep track of what has already occurred and what is to be expected for the rest of the month.

The daily pacer can also be turned off, and simply track how much has been spent so far v.s. the remaining budget amount on discretionary spending.

Budget dashboard during the last 7 days of the month

The prompt to transfer potential savings amount towards existing savings goals (under the Autosave experience) will only show up during the last 7 days of the month.

This is to ensure users will not be over-draft by upcoming bills and transfers that are expected to occur.

Tracking each category with transactions:

Users are able to track transactions under each category that have already occurred v.s. expected to occur later in the month to ensure their numbers are concrete.

Alternatively, if an expected transaction did not occur by the end of the month we verify with the user to see if they would like to adjust their budget amount to exclude that transaction for the following month.

Income & other inflows are separated from bills, transfers, discretionary spending (i.e. outflows) to avoid confusion between money coming in and money going out.

Switching budget category for transactions

Users have the ability to switch a transaction’s budget category or choose whether or not it should be included in their budget.

e.g. A new Verizon transaction that has < 3 months of recurrence would be considered discretionary spending. The user can choose to include it as part of their bills. Additionally, the experience will automatically add the transaction towards bills after 3 months of recurrence.