A Day in the Life of Alex Rivera

The 4-step onboarding screen needs to answer Alex's three unspoken questions immediately: What does this do? Do I have to connect my bank? Is this going to be complicated? Each step addresses one of those fears, building trust before asking Alex to create an account. The progress dots show it's short. The copy emphasizes "no bank link required."

The dashboard is the "front door" — it answers the one question every user has every time they open the app: Am I okay right now? The four stat cards (income, spent, remaining, savings rate) are ordered intentionally: good news first (income), then reality check (spent), then the number that matters most (remaining), then the habit goal (savings rate). The donut chart makes categories scannable in under 3 seconds.

This is the core input mechanism — the app is only as useful as the data you put into it. The add-transaction flow is deliberately minimal: type, category, amount. Three fields, one tap. The category dropdown doubles as a budget tracker input — every transaction logged here automatically feeds the budget bars on the next screen. The full transaction list gives Alex a searchable, scrollable record of every dollar.

A transaction list tells you what happened. A budget tells you what's about to happen. The budget screen shifts Alex from reactive to proactive — seeing "near limit" on March 6th changes behavior for the rest of the month. Color-coded status (green / yellow / red) makes the signal immediate without requiring any math. The progress bar is the most important element on this page: it externalizes a number that would otherwise live only in Alex's head.

Budgets prevent bad spending. Goals create a reason to save. Without a concrete target, "saving money" is abstract and easy to skip. The goals screen makes saving tangible: a named thing, an emoji that makes it feel real, a percentage that moves when you contribute. The visual progress bar is the most motivating element in the entire app — it turns a financial behavior into something that feels like a game.

Debt is the most emotionally charged part of personal finance. The debt planner doesn't just show the problem — it shows the path out. The slider is the key UX element: it makes the relationship between extra payments and time visceral and immediate. Every $25 you drag on that slider shaves months off your payoff date. The avalanche vs. snowball choice respects that different users respond to different motivations (math vs. momentum).