I helped two startup founders build a mobile-first web app that predicts cash flow for small businesses.
Previously I worked with Sean Collins of Signal Financial Technologies on a medicinal cannabis startup called eo. I bring this up because he had trouble getting a holistic view of eo's cash flow, which is a common problem: over 80% of small businesses fail because of cash flow problems.
We partnered together to try and solve this epidemic.
Client
Signal Financial Technologies
Duration
May 2019 - September 2020
Services
My Role
UX Designer
Website
The challenge
Monit is an app that gives financial advice on a business's cash flow. No Econ degree needed.
It uses accounting and transaction data, competitor insights, and macro trends to predict your cash flow's future.
An app like this hasn't existed before, so how did we do it? We started with a workshop.
The workshop was a great coming-together for the founders and my team. They lent their financial expertise while we showed them how to visualize and interact with data. My manager at the time, Brodie Rich, was the key facilitator while I helped set the stage with competitive inspiration and sketching tutorials. Brodie and I sketched ideas with 6 other teammates and both founders over the course of two days.
Three examples from our workshop's "war room" that directly inspired our onboarding flow, homepage and notifications.
The workshop clarified a problem for us: would the app use a poetic metaphor or a literal representation of data?
The founders liked the idea of a poetic metaphor, similar to the Acorns app, but our team pushed them towards literal representations of data. It would be easier to create MVP and rebrand to a metaphor later, if we desired.
In the end this decision worked very well for their new target market (but I won't get ahead of myself…)
The main homepage will include the menu, main stats at a glance, today's insights, and the interactive cash flow chart.
The beginning
Our dot voting elected a winner, so we immediately got to work making it real.
I helped create some user journey maps and service blueprints that gave my team a holistic view of how the app would function at different stages, which helped us design features, edge cases, and error states.
A brief aside: I like to shorten "small-to-medium size businesses" to "SMBs" throughout this case study.
The blueprint on the left focuses on the onboarding stage.
The Onboarding
Business owners need to upload their accounting data in order to get started. How can we persuade them to share such sensitive information?
We designed for trust.
Verification begins in the new user's email inbox. The onboarding process, part of which is shown below, emphasizes bank-level security and proper authorization.
All of the final visual designs were by the brilliant Tobias Ecsedy.
Once the financial data is uploaded, an onboarding wizard guides the new user through a tutorial to learn the key parts of the app.
Insights and Events
The magic of the app is in the Insights and Events tabs.
We designed Insight and Event cards to contain as much information as possible before a user makes a desicion.
Each Insight card has a relevant call-to-action for users to contact clients, shift their expense planning, etc. A custom Event card can include anything: a new hire, increasing rent, buying equipment, etc.
Insights are ordered by priority, which is indicated by the colorful rectangle on the left-hand side.
Events are ordered chronologically but the higher probability cards are stacked higher than others in the same timeframe.
Getting investment
Once our design work was finished, Tobias and I animated our mockups to help the founders get investment.
They were in conversations with their now long-term client, Eastern Bank. We were tasked with distilling months of work into a quick narrative video. It focuses on improving the lives of SMBs and giving just a taste of how Monit works.
The campaigns
About 40% of startups pivot, and Monit was no different. We started partnering with banks instead of getting SMBs to sign up directly.
Instead of struggling to convince them to upload sensitive data, we would leverage their banking relationship.
This pivot presented me with an opportunity: design the Admin Tool for banks to run campaigns and help SMBs.
I was tasked with creating the end-to-end experience for the bankers that utilize Monit. They're able to sign up, import their clients and see a dashboard of accounts, signups, and client financial trends. It's a very utilitarian tool to design; I didn't have any major challenges when creating it.
It was a fun exercise for me to go "under the hood" after spending so much time on the front-facing side of Monit.
The main homepage (left) and the Create Campaign page.
The results
Our relationship with Monit helped them successfully launch and continue their business today.
Monit is offered through 10+ global financial corporations and has surfaced millions in potential revenue and growth opportunities for SMBs.
Thanks to Steve, Sean, and the fantastic team I worked with at MERGE. Keep scrolling to see a walkthrough video of the app that Tobias and I created.
UX Designer
Chris Locke
Founders
Creative Director
Dave Batista
Design Director
Brodie Rich
Lead Visual Designer
Tobias Ecsedy
Lead UX Designer
Shane Garvey
Tech Leads
John Maloney & Adam Crane