3Nickels

THE CLIENT

3Nickels is a monthly subscription-based app that calls itself The Financial Advisor In Your Pocket®. It offers dozens of tools to help monitor your finances and reach your financial goals across a wide variety of topics (such as saving for retirement, buying a house, or restructuring debt). The app is a judgement-free place to get straight-forward guidance, with a strong focus on learning financial literacy without the distraction of ads or the threat of your data being sold. Additional information can be found here, and the app is currently available in the App Store and on Google Play.

THE WORK

I was brought on as a ux consultant to advise and assist the 3Nickels team in building their mobile app in 2020-2021, and saw the project through to launch. When I came on board, the brand identity and guidelines were already established, and certain design elements like color, photography, and iconography were in place. My mandate was broad: take the app from initial design ideas to product launch, be the voice of the design team to decision makers in C suite, and coach the in-house design team along the way. After auditing existing designs and processes, the first step was to create and implement the foundational design process for the team that allowed us to establish best practices to help organize and streamline our work. This framework allowed us to establish close working relationships and feedback loops with the dev teams and internal stakeholders, and ensure seamless and efficient delivery of assets.

Building on existing branding guidelines, I created a full design system for the app and built out the library assets and documentation for the design and engineering teams. From there, we were able to focus on designing out the UI and UX of the rest of the tools that comprise the app, from wireframes to delivery of the finished hi fi designs to the dev teams.