Designing Navi's 0→1 expense tracking and financial management tool — helping financially stretched Indian consumers automate insights, track spending, and stay in control of their money.
Role
Product designer 2
Scope
0→1 feature
Research
50+ interviews
Duration
1 month • AUg'24-sep'24
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THE PROBLEM
Navi users knew they were over spending. They just found out too late.
Users juggling EMIs, bills, and daily expenses struggled with financial stress — not because they lacked discipline, but because they lacked visibility. Existing apps only showed where money had already gone. None helped users plan ahead or avoid financial crunches before they happened.
How Users Were Managing Money
Manual Excel sheets and physical notebooks — time-consuming and error-prone
60% of users tracked expenses manually, spending ~1 hour daily
Frequently missed bill and EMI payments due to no automated reminders
No holistic overview across accounts — bank apps only show one account at a time
Reactive behaviour — reviewing spending only after a bad month
Paycheck-to-paycheck users hit hardest — one missed EMI cascades
What good looks like
Automated tracking — no manual entry, no missed expenses
Bills and EMIs surfaced before they hit, not after
Cross-account consolidated view — one total, all accounts
Proactive alerts when spending deviates from usual patterns
Spend goals that create a feedback loop — not just a number
The brief
Design a tool that works automatically — so users get clarity without effort, and catch problems before they become crises.
1
Manual tracking burden
2
Missed payments
3
No holistic view
User Research
50 conversations. One consistent emotional arc.
Through 50+ in-depth interactions across diverse demographics — security engineers, wholesalers, project engineers — the same story emerged every time. Optimism at salary credit. Surprise at an unexpected bill mid-month. Stress and scrambling by month end. The emotional pattern was universal, regardless of income level.
Ravi, 29
Security Engineer · ₹80,000/month
"Manual tracking takes up so much of my time"
Current Behavior & Pain Points
Uses both physical notebooks and Excel to track EMIs. Spending 5-7 years tracking manually — finds it cumbersome and time-consuming.
Asif, 36
Wholesaler · ₹2,25,000/mo
Current Behavior & Pain Points
Manages personal and business expenses separately. Spends ~1 hour daily accounting for expenses across a diary and OkCredit.
Mishal, 31
Project Engineer · ₹1,25,000/mo
"I feel stressed about my finances due to overspending"
Current Behavior & Pain Points
Began tracking after consistently exceeding income each month. Uses Excel but finds it lacks automation — leading to frequent overspending.
Research Findings
Six pain patterns. All pointing to the same root cause.
The research artifacts told a clear story — Excel files with 30+ rows of manually entered expenses, handwritten notebooks with crossed-out totals, and a week-by-week emotional calendar that showed the same downward spiral every month. The root cause wasn't overspending. It was the absence of timely, effortless information.
1
End-of-month financial stress
2
Low awareness of monthly spending
3
Severe impact for paycheck-to-paycheck users
4
Concern over significant deviation
5
Spending reduction through goal tracking
6
Reactive tracking after a bad month
These insights collectively reflect a user's typical mid-month financial experience — and with a minimum frequency of each use case, the research projected meaningful monthly app opens.
The opportunity wasn't to build a ledger. It was to build a financial calendar the user never had to fill in.
Competitive Analysis
Six apps benchmarked. The gap was obvious.
We benchmarked Monarch, Fold, Jupiter, Indmoney, PhonePe, and Digit — analysing automated tracking depth, bill awareness, spend categorisation, and goal-setting. The consistent gap: no app used Account Aggregator infrastructure to eliminate manual input entirely. All required some degree of user effort to get started.
Monarch
Borrowed
Clean goal-setting and budget UI. Strong category customisation inspired our spend goal feature and category drill-down structure.
Jupiter
Borrowed
Monthly cashflow with incoming/outgoing split. Influenced our monthly summary design and total spend header hierarchy.
Indmoney
NOTED
Bank + credit card tracking in one view. Informed our
multi-account aggregation approach and self-transfer handling logic.
PhonePe
Borrowed
Account Aggregator for bank statement access. Directly informed our AA-powered zero-setup tracking — the key differentiator.
Fold
Diverged
Spending summary scoped to a single bank account. We built a truly consolidated cross-account view — one number,
all banks.
Digit
Diverged
Savings-first framing. Useful reference for goal mechanics — but we prioritised spend awareness before nudging toward savings.
Opportunity Identified
The benchmarking confirmed our hypothesis: automation was the untapped lever. Every app asked users to do some work to get started — categorise a transaction, add a bill, log their income. We decided to do none of that. If users could open the app and immediately see real data about their own finances, the adoption barrier disappears entirely.
Business Case
Money Manager wasn't a utility feature. It was Navi's engagement engine.
ENGAGEMENT
Drive Habit Formation
CROSS-SELL
Monetize Context
RETAIN
Increase Switching Costs
❌ Limited-time sponsor thinking
Chase eyeballs during the tournament. Push ticket pre-sales. Go quiet after the final.
✅ The question we actually asked
"What if we designed for season-long engagement instead of fleeting eyeballs?"
THE PIVOT
Instead of acting like a limited-time sponsor, we designed Powerplay as a product-powered fan experience baked into the app. Not to sell tickets — but to sell a feeling. Of belonging. Of competition. Of coming back daily.
The Concept
Score Big With Every Pay.
A game layer built on top of daily UPI usage. Every transaction triggers a scratch card to reveal a random RCB player. Collect all 11 unique players and win ₹1,000 + signed RCB merchandise. The game runs automatically — whether you're paying a mobile bill or a credit card.
Design Process
Three decisions that shaped everything.
Decision 1
Seamless over spectacular
The temptation was a dedicated game hub — a separate section users would visit intentionally. We pushed back hard. A separate destination requires motivation to open it. We needed zero additional motivation. The reward had to live inside the payment flow itself, where attention already was.
DECISION
Gamification triggers automatically on the payment success screen — when dopamine is already high. No onboarding, no extra entry point. The scratch card is a bonus that appears, not a feature you have to discover.
Decision 2
Collectibles over cashback multipliers
We explored a straightforward rewards multiplier first — pay more, earn more coins. It tested flat. The Rangoli insight told us that collection-based challenges create a fundamentally different psychological pull. The incompleteness of a partial squad is more motivating than a balance growing slowly in the background.
DECISION
Named RCB player cards as collectibles — not points. Each card has a position: batsman, bowler, wicket keeper. The visual of an incomplete pitch creates natural urgency. "2 more to complete your squad" beats "500 more coins to your next reward."
Decision 3
Built to outlive the season
Most campaign designs are throwaway — bespoke assets, hardcoded logic, rebuilt from scratch each time. With a 1-week delivery window and future seasonal plans, this had to be different. I designed the underlying system as a reusable modular framework from day one.
DECISION
Modular campaign system — swap the theme (IPL → Diwali → New Year), swap the collectible type, keep the mechanics and component architecture. Engineers build once. Designers reskin. The framework was reused across 4+ campaigns post-launch.
Key Design Decisions
The choices that made it feel like IPL
Decision 01
Motion as the reward signal
Decision 02
The pitch as the collection UI
Decision 03
Microcopy as the game mechanic
Decision 04
Visual language borrowed from the sport
Built for IPL. Designed for everything after.
The campaign was scoped tightly for IPL 2025 — but the underlying framework was always designed to outlive the season and power the organisation's always-on growth ambitions.
Scratch card mechanic on payment success screen
Coins per unique player type — category diversity incentive
RCB player card collectibles — 11 unique players
Mega reward for completing full squad (₹1,000 + merchandise)
Cricket pitch UI for squad progress
tracking
Modular campaign design system + reusable UI vault
Future — Campaign Framework
→ Festive reskin — Diwali sticker collectibles
→ New Year edition — countdown reward mechanic
→ Product launch gamification — feature discovery loops
→ Social sharing and friend-invite leaderboards
→ Always-on engagement engine beyond seasonal events
TESTIMONIALs
Reflection
What I learned
The constraint was the brief.
No ATL presence, limited SKU, 1-week window — these weren't obstacles, they were the design prompt. The constraint of not being able to push tickets forced a better question: what experience could we build that would outlast the tournament?
Emotion beats incentive.
We didn't win because we offered the best cashback. We won because collecting an RCB player card after paying a bill made users feel like fans, not customers. The cricket emotion did the heavy lifting — our job was to not get in its way.
Design for reuse from day one.
The modular system decision paid dividends immediately. Four campaigns later, the team was shipping in days, not weeks. If I could go back, I'd push even harder on the component documentation to make handoffs between design and engineering smoother.
One week is enough — if the problem is clear.
The speed was only possible because the design question was well-defined before any screen was drawn. Concept to dev-ready in 7 days with a 12-person engineering team aligned — that's a process outcome, not a heroic one.