As part of a job application I was given the task to imagine a banking app. This is what I came up with over the course of a weekend. In the UK at least, the state of banking apps is poor. My bank, HSBC, is particularly bad. They have a mobile website which is a pain to login to, and when you finally log in, you can basically only view your balance – great! I wanted to focus on three main areas, Spending, Saving, and Sending Money. I felt these are things that would be useful on the go and in the context of a mobile app.

The main idea was to make managing money much easier, I think it makes much more sense for your bank to automatically categorise your spending rather than doing it manually in another app. Then using all the data they have to display your spending in a more useful manner. I blended that with the options to set monthly budgets and view your spending based on categories. The saving section is to encourage users to think about spending and to get targets on how much they want to save each month. Finally the sending money tab is about making it much easier to send money to your friends. Currently bank transfers are a pain, having to enter account numbers and sort codes. But if both users have this app, the bank already has their details so sending money can easily be made much easier, just requiring an e-mail or phone number.

This is far from a comprehensive, or perfect mock-up of a banking app, but if a start and definitely something I’d love to see a bank developing. Putting time and money into improving the customer’s experience is always resources well spent!

This was my first attempt at designing an iPhone app, and I have to admit, designing for the Retina screen is a very strange experience at first. The images are huge on my display (which is high resolution itself 2560×1440) and having to continually keep in mind how small the end result is displayed. Overall I think it came out pretty well.