Creating Financial Transparency for Married Couples: a UI/UX case study
Ally Zitzka, Susie Shen, Peyton Lee, Joey Schafer
Problem & Solution Overview
In recent years, divorce rates in the United States have persisted at around 50%, which represents roughly a quarter of a million Americans each year. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, among 52 surveyed couples filing for divorces, 50% cited financial issues as a leading motivator. Even amongst still-married couples, a 2021 survey by Fidelity Investments found that 13–25% of couples cited money issues as the largest issue in their relationship. In short, finances are a huge point of conflict for many couples, and this conflict has only become exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
There are a vast array of existing tools that attempt to tackle financial conflicts, but conflicts continue to persist. These issues range from income gaps, differences in long-term saving and investment goals, and power dynamics that play out in financial decisions. Budget planning lessons, improving access to shared financial information, and communication about financial goals are good ways for couples to build financial trust in each other and help manage the financial well-being of a new household, but ultimately may not resolve small-scale, day-to-day conflicts. These issues can include making uninformed purchases, failing to track spending, or exceeding budgets.
We wanted to develop a system for married couples that can aid in managing shared budgets. Successfully managing shared finances can reduce the strain of financial stress on married couples, thereby promoting healthier, longer-lasting relationships. Specifically, are creating a system which allows for easy, automatic entry of purchase information to a budget tracker, such as by automatically scanning purchase receipts.
Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants
The goal of our design research was to learn more about the specific sets of difficulties that recently-married couples commonly experience under the broad umbrella of financial issues. We wanted to understand what systems couples currently use and where they fall short, so as to design systems that can bridge these gaps. To do so, we conducted online surveys and interviews with recently-married couples. Surveys were beneficial as they are able to be done in a low-contact manner, which is highly beneficial in a pandemic environment. While surveys are not as granular, surveys can be more quickly delivered to a much larger audience of users, allowing for a greater breadth of responses. Surveys also structure feedback in a more quantitative manner, which can generate more generalizable insights. Interviews complemented our online surveys, as they allowed us to get more in-depth, qualitative responses to questions and explore user answers. Interviews allow us to respond to user answers and ask additional follow-ups that we simply can’t in a survey environment. As a result, we were able to collect both quantitative and qualitative results on our user space.
We contacted 10 personal connections for surveys, as well as a broader solicitation of general married couples via the Reddit polling communities r/SurveyExchange and r/SampleSize, which yielded 18 responses, for a grand total of 28 responses. Out of respect for our surveyee’s privacy, we did not collect detailed demographic information on our respondents. Previous work on demographics of Reddit users, however, has shown that 85% of users are under 50 and that the population on Reddit tends to skew male and highly educated.
We interviewed three married individuals with whom we had personal connections. All three of these interviews were video interviews conducted over Zoom. We were not able to interview couples together due to our short time window and scheduling conflicts. We interviewed two men and one woman, all of whom are middle-class, Caucasian, live in the Seattle area, and are in heterosexual relationships. They represented similar age bands as well, as they were all in their mid-20’s to mid-30’s. Because our sampling pool was both small and not very diverse, our interviewee’s attitudes towards joint financial management may not reflect the total scope of financial problems experienced by couples.
Design Research Results & Themes
From our interviews, we found that many of the financial issues that couples faced stemmed from a lack of shared financial information and awareness. While couples often share the same goals, it’s common for one partner to lack detailed information on their shared financial situation. This can cause one partner to make unwise spending or investment decisions due to a lack of information.
The act of tracking spending while budgeting was also described as a challenge. Some partners frequently forget to enter spending information into their chosen budget tracking application, requiring extra effort down the line and causing frustration or anxiety in their relationship.
The survey results highlighted more systemic issues for couples, such as patriarchal power imbalance in financial decision-making or a lack of financial literacy. While these issues were also compelling, we felt that these did not lend themselves to technological solutions. These problems are better served by either educational resources, or by systemic reforms such as reducing healthcare costs and strengthening our society’s social safety net (through better unemployment insurance, universal basic income, etc.), and such reforms will not be able to be implemented through designing a technological artifact or system alone. Therefore, due to the combination of both potential for impact as well as the feasibility of technology to play a role in solving these problems, we focused on solving issues of budgeting and spending tracking.
Several desired tasks emerged from discussions with participants. The first task was accountability when tracking spending and budgets. Most couples were aware that they needed to categorize and track spending, but failed to follow through. Participants also had a desire for greater visibility into their partner’s spending. Several participants noted that one partner often made large purchases with no communication beforehand, identifying it as a source of consistent conflict. Related to this issue, many participants felt that their partner dominated financial planning and wanted to be included more in the process.
Proposed Design
Our proposed design is a receipt scanner that can be used to track items immediately after making a purchase. This is a small portable scanner that can be attached to a keychain. The core components of the item are a scanner, which can be used to scan receipts, and a camera, which can be used to take photos of larger bills. This would then integrate into an application accessible on both mobile and desktop systems, which would allow users to see the status of their budgets by category. The main improvements our system offers over pre-existing solutions are ease of use, itemization of receipts, and automatic categorization of purchases.
Fig. 1: The initial sketches for the proposed receipt scanner and companion system.
The ease of use of this system is much higher than other systems. With the physical component of our design, the scanner attached to a user’s keychain, scanning in a receipt with purchase information as soon as a purchase is made is quick and simple. This would address one of the primary concerns given in our user research, which is that couples did not keep up to date with their purchases and budgeting information.
In a similar vein, when a receipt is scanned in through our system, the individual items on the receipt will be identified and automatically categorized into a particular budget category (such as “food,” “home goods,” or “recreation”) based on the store or vendor. Specific items on the receipt can be re-classified, such as when going to a department store and buying items in one trip from multiple categories, allowing greater granularity when tracking spending. The system automatically tracks spending across categories and makes this information visible to both partners, increasing financial awareness. Since the budget is set by both partners working together to create a budget within their context, this system will help reduce errors from gaps in financial knowledge.
