Montro

A gamified personal finance app designed to help young adults build consistent spending and saving habits through expense tracking, personalized savings goals, and rewards.

Role: UX/UI Design, User Research
Project Period: Jan 7 – May 16, 2025
Collaboration: 6 UX/UI Designers / UX Researchers and 4 Full-stack Developers
Focus: Gamification · Habit Formation · Goal Setting

01 Overview

Overview

Montro is a gamified expense-tracking app designed to help people build consistent spending habits. The final goal is building long-term tracking expenses, healthy financial habits, featuring clear goals, progress feedback, and rewards. To reduce logging fatigue, Montro turns daily logging into a quick, motivating routine, so users can stay aware of their spending without feeling overwhelmed.

02 Opportunities

Opportunities

Montro started with why young generations (Late 10s - Early 20s) struggle to build expense-tracking habits. From the research, many participants aware of the importance of tracking, however, they described expense logging as tedious and easy to abandon; tracking expenses could be easily discouraged by manual typing and getting lost on track. This gap created an opportunity to redesign expense tracking as a low-effort routine supported by habit-building cues and rewards.

03 User Research

User Research

Survey results from 10 participants pointed out that expense tracking often relies on familiar, long-standing routines such as writing down in a notebook or memo app rather than dedicated apps. The main barriers were low sustained motivation, bothersome from opening an app for every purchase, and the friction that manual entry is tedious. Some free expense tracking apps in the market were described as discouraging due to distracting ads, cluttered, overly complex layouts, and no motivation.

Montro's approach to tackle this struggle:

1. Easy to log expenses: Make it quick and easy to log expenses without having to open an app for every purchase.

2. Guidance for saving goals and spending limits: Set specific saving goals and spending limits to help users stay on track with financial guidance.

3. Motivational streaks & rewards: Create a sense of achievement by offering rewards for logging expenses and meeting goals.

04 Findings & Starting Point

Findings & Starting Point

The insights showed that the young generation understands that expense tracking is important, but staying consistent is hard because there is no motivation. And, Logging habits take time to build. To help users form a long-term habit, logging must be quick and easy, and the app should motivate them with progress updates and small rewards.

Two user personas were created to ensure Montro’s design strategy.

Montro’s information architecture was built around the main user journeys and the key features needed for simple daily tracking.

05 Brand Guidelines

Brand Guidelines

The visual concept is a playful, fun, gamified experience with a bright neon green and dark purple palette to create positive vibes. The low-fidelity wireframes were created to quickly explore layout, features and flow. Then, high-fidelity mockups were created to refine the visual style and interactions. The design system was built around a clear hierarchy, strong contrast, and simplified layouts to make financial information easy to read without overwhelming users.

06 Lo-fis & Hi-fis

Lo-fis & Hi-fis

Lo-Fis:

Hi-Fis:

07 Key Features

Key Features

1. Fast expense logging: Small purchases often didn’t feel worth the effort to log. A quick logging and receipt-scan feature lets users capture an expense with a photo upload, while manual entry is available when there’s no receipt.

2. Guided budget setup: Budgeting starts with simple, age-based suggestions informed by financial research, with full customization to match personal goals and saving preferences.

3. Rewards for motivation: To support habit-building and motivate users to keep logging, completing a goal triggers a motivational moment. Users earn reward points for reaching goals and can redeem them for gift cards.

08 Promotional Video

Promotional Video

09 Learning Outcomes & Next Steps

Learning Outcomes & Next Steps

From exploring references, building mood boards, pivoting visual direction and communicating with full-stack developers. This project taught me how a simple idea can be developed into an app. It was not just designing from scratch; it’s actually figuring out what they need, such as researching young users and understanding the frictions. The Montro project strengthened design-system thinking by defining information hierarchy and a consistent UI for data-heavy screens. Collaborating with 8 students, including full-stack development students, was a valuable experience to improve effective communication and cross-functional collaboration.

Montro’s next steps are connecting with all Canadian banks' apps in high-level information security to make logging in easier, more comfortable, and expanding the age range to mid-aged users as well.

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