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NOUMI

Turning Emotional Spending into Empowered Choices: Designing Noumi from 0→1

An illustrative sketch of a flower

Overview

Noumi is a mobile fintech wellness app designed to help Gen Z and Millennial users better understand emotional spending and build healthier financial habits.

Unlike traditional budgeting tools that focus solely on numbers, Noumi uses AI to detect impulse purchases, forecast financial stress, and support behavior change through personalized routines and emotionally intelligent nudges.

Goals

  1. Help users recognize and understand their emotional spending patterns
  2. Encourage healthy money behavior through personalized, easy-to-track habits
  3. Use past spending data to provide predictive insights and timely nudges that alert users to potential financial stress, helping them stay in control
  4. Create an app experience that is intuitive, motivating, and emotionally aware
  5. Launch a functional MVP integrated with live transaction data via Plaid

Role

Product Designer

Responsibilities

End-to-End UX & UI Design Process

Collaborators

Design, Product, and Engineering

Timeline

Apr 25 - July 2, 2025

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

Most finance apps focus on tracking numbers, not behavior. They fail to address the emotional reasons behind spending, leaving users without the tools to understand patterns, avoid impulsive decisions, or build sustainable habits.

RESEARCH

Competitive Analysis & User Interviews

IDEATION

Developing Concepts

Onboarding Quiz

Goal: Personalizing the experience from the get go

Before syncing financial data, users complete a short quiz to set their top money goals such as saving budgeting or paying off debt. This allows the app to tailor habit plans and set the foundation for coaching and nudges.

  • Uses friendly simple language to make goal setting feel approachable
  • Enables instant personalization based on user intentions not just spending patterns

Impulse spending detection

Goal: Helping users connect emotions to spending habits

Noumi flags potential impulse purchases based on time, frequency, and amount. Users are gently prompted to reflect on what might have triggered the spend. These check-ins help build emotional awareness and train the machine learning model to recognize anomalies and impulse tracking.

  • Micro check-ins after emotional spend moments
  • Calm, supportive tone with no judgment
  • Machine learning model adapts over time based on user behavior and feedback

Habit tracking & streaks

Goal: Helping users build better money habits through small and consistent actions

Users receive personalized habits based on their spending patterns and financial goals. Completing daily habits adds to their streaks, making progress feel rewarding and visible. Weekly recaps highlight successful habits and reinforce positive behavior over time.

  • Habits tailored to real user behavior and goals
  • Gamified streaks add motivation and a sense of momentum
  • Weekly recaps reinforce progress and celebrate consistency
  • Simple tap-to-complete interactions for ease and clarity

Spending analysis

Goal: Helping users visualize their spending habits

Once the users connect their bank account through Plaid, Noumi analyzes 12 months of transactions and generates a spending analysis.

  • Top spending categories
  • Impulse spending recognition
  • Familiar design: Instagram story/Spotify wrapped inspired analysis
  • Data driven habit suggestions

HANDOFF

Engineering Collaboration

Under the hood

Noumi’s backend processes live financial data to deliver intelligent, personalized insights. At a high level:

  • Bank transactions are pulled via Plaid and stored in a PostgreSQL database
  • Machine learning models classify emotional spending and forecast financial stress
  • LLM (GPT-4) generates personalized habit plans and weekly summaries
  • A nudge engine delivers behavior-based push notifications through FastAPI
  • All insights surface in the mobile app in real time, with coaching tailored to each user

Figma Handoff

I handed off completed designs to developers for implementation prioritizing clear communication, detailed specifications, and ongoing support to ensure developers can accurately build the product as intended.

QA

I partnered with front-end engineers to perform design QA, identifying and resolving UI bugs to deliver high-quality, production-ready interfaces.

TAKEAWAYS

What I Learned

  • Being flexible: we narrowed the scope or de-scoped multiple features to stay aligned with technical constraints and delivery timelines. I rapidly iterated on wireframes and flows to reflect updated goals and communicated trade-offs clearly, helping the team make informed decisions about what to cut, keep, or defer.
  • Advocating for user needs while working with very senior team members: I learned to confidently present design rationale backed by data and usability principles, while staying open to feedback and constraints. This required balancing assertiveness with collaboration, knowing when to push for user-centric solutions and when to adapt based on broader product or technical considerations.
  • Compromise is part of collaboration: Not every design detail made it to implementation, and that was okay. I learned to prioritize what mattered most for the user and collaborate on workarounds when ideal solutions weren’t feasible.

Let’s work together

NOUMI

Turning Emotional Spending into Empowered Choices: Designing Noumi from 0→1

An illustrative sketch of a flower

Overview

Noumi is a mobile fintech wellness app designed to help Gen Z and Millennial users better understand emotional spending and build healthier financial habits.

Unlike traditional budgeting tools that focus solely on numbers, Noumi uses AI to detect impulse purchases, forecast financial stress, and support behavior change through personalized routines and emotionally intelligent nudges.

Goals

  1. Help users recognize and understand their emotional spending patterns
  2. Encourage healthy money behavior through personalized, easy-to-track habits
  3. Use past spending data to provide predictive insights and timely nudges that alert users to potential financial stress, helping them stay in control
  4. Create an app experience that is intuitive, motivating, and emotionally aware
  5. Launch a functional MVP integrated with live transaction data via Plaid

Role

Product Designer

Responsibilities

End-to-End UX & UI Design Process

Collaborators

Design, Product, and Engineering

Timeline

Apr 25 - July 2, 2025

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

Most finance apps focus on tracking numbers, not behavior. They fail to address the emotional reasons behind spending, leaving users without the tools to understand patterns, avoid impulsive decisions, or build sustainable habits.

RESEARCH

Competitive Analysis & User Interviews

IDEATION

Developing Concepts

Onboarding Quiz

Goal: Personalizing the experience from the get go

Before syncing financial data, users complete a short quiz to set their top money goals such as saving budgeting or paying off debt. This allows the app to tailor habit plans and set the foundation for coaching and nudges.

  • Uses friendly simple language to make goal setting feel approachable
  • Enables instant personalization based on user intentions not just spending patterns

Impulse spending detection

Goal: Helping users connect emotions to spending habits

Noumi flags potential impulse purchases based on time, frequency, and amount. Users are gently prompted to reflect on what might have triggered the spend. These check-ins help build emotional awareness and train the machine learning model to recognize anomalies and impulse tracking.

  • Micro check-ins after emotional spend moments
  • Calm, supportive tone with no judgment
  • Machine learning model adapts over time based on user behavior and feedback

Habit tracking & streaks

Goal: Helping users build better money habits through small and consistent actions

Users receive personalized habits based on their spending patterns and financial goals. Completing daily habits adds to their streaks, making progress feel rewarding and visible. Weekly recaps highlight successful habits and reinforce positive behavior over time.

  • Habits tailored to real user behavior and goals
  • Gamified streaks add motivation and a sense of momentum
  • Weekly recaps reinforce progress and celebrate consistency
  • Simple tap-to-complete interactions for ease and clarity

Spending analysis

Goal: Helping users visualize their spending habits

Once the users connect their bank account through Plaid, Noumi analyzes 12 months of transactions and generates a spending analysis.

  • Top spending categories
  • Impulse spending recognition
  • Familiar design: Instagram story/Spotify wrapped inspired analysis
  • Data driven habit suggestions

HANDOFF

Engineering Collaboration

Under the hood

Noumi’s backend processes live financial data to deliver intelligent, personalized insights. At a high level:

  • Bank transactions are pulled via Plaid and stored in a PostgreSQL database
  • Machine learning models classify emotional spending and forecast financial stress
  • LLM (GPT-4) generates personalized habit plans and weekly summaries
  • A nudge engine delivers behavior-based push notifications through FastAPI
  • All insights surface in the mobile app in real time, with coaching tailored to each user

Figma Handoff

I handed off completed designs to developers for implementation prioritizing clear communication, detailed specifications, and ongoing support to ensure developers can accurately build the product as intended.

QA

I partnered with front-end engineers to perform design QA, identifying and resolving UI bugs to deliver high-quality, production-ready interfaces.

TAKEAWAYS

What I Learned

  • Being flexible: we narrowed the scope or de-scoped multiple features to stay aligned with technical constraints and delivery timelines. I rapidly iterated on wireframes and flows to reflect updated goals and communicated trade-offs clearly, helping the team make informed decisions about what to cut, keep, or defer.
  • Advocating for user needs while working with very senior team members: I learned to confidently present design rationale backed by data and usability principles, while staying open to feedback and constraints. This required balancing assertiveness with collaboration, knowing when to push for user-centric solutions and when to adapt based on broader product or technical considerations.
  • Compromise is part of collaboration: Not every design detail made it to implementation, and that was okay. I learned to prioritize what mattered most for the user and collaborate on workarounds when ideal solutions weren’t feasible.

Let’s work together

NOUMI

Turning Emotional Spending into Empowered Choices: Designing Noumi from 0→1

An illustrative sketch of a flower

Overview

Noumi is a mobile fintech wellness app designed to help Gen Z and Millennial users better understand emotional spending and build healthier financial habits.

Unlike traditional budgeting tools that focus solely on numbers, Noumi uses AI to detect impulse purchases, forecast financial stress, and support behavior change through personalized routines and emotionally intelligent nudges.

Goals

  1. Help users recognize and understand their emotional spending patterns
  2. Encourage healthy money behavior through personalized, easy-to-track habits
  3. Use past spending data to provide predictive insights and timely nudges that alert users to potential financial stress, helping them stay in control
  4. Create an app experience that is intuitive, motivating, and emotionally aware
  5. Launch a functional MVP integrated with live transaction data via Plaid

Role

Product Designer

Responsibilities

End-to-End UX & UI Design Process

Collaborators

Design, Product, and Engineering

Timeline

Apr 25 - July 2, 2025

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

Most finance apps focus on tracking numbers, not behavior. They fail to address the emotional reasons behind spending, leaving users without the tools to understand patterns, avoid impulsive decisions, or build sustainable habits.

RESEARCH

Competitive Analysis & User Interviews

IDEATION

Developing Concepts

Onboarding Quiz

Goal: Personalizing the experience from the get go

Before syncing financial data, users complete a short quiz to set their top money goals such as saving budgeting or paying off debt. This allows the app to tailor habit plans and set the foundation for coaching and nudges.

  • Uses friendly simple language to make goal setting feel approachable
  • Enables instant personalization based on user intentions not just spending patterns

Impulse spending detection

Goal: Helping users connect emotions to spending habits

Noumi flags potential impulse purchases based on time, frequency, and amount. Users are gently prompted to reflect on what might have triggered the spend. These check-ins help build emotional awareness and train the machine learning model to recognize anomalies and impulse tracking.

  • Micro check-ins after emotional spend moments
  • Calm, supportive tone with no judgment
  • Machine learning model adapts over time based on user behavior and feedback

Habit tracking & streaks

Goal: Helping users build better money habits through small and consistent actions

Users receive personalized habits based on their spending patterns and financial goals. Completing daily habits adds to their streaks, making progress feel rewarding and visible. Weekly recaps highlight successful habits and reinforce positive behavior over time.

  • Habits tailored to real user behavior and goals
  • Gamified streaks add motivation and a sense of momentum
  • Weekly recaps reinforce progress and celebrate consistency
  • Simple tap-to-complete interactions for ease and clarity

Spending analysis

Goal: Helping users visualize their spending habits

Once the users connect their bank account through Plaid, Noumi analyzes 12 months of transactions and generates a spending analysis.

  • Top spending categories
  • Impulse spending recognition
  • Familiar design: Instagram story/Spotify wrapped inspired analysis
  • Data driven habit suggestions

HANDOFF

Engineering Collaboration

Under the hood

Noumi’s backend processes live financial data to deliver intelligent, personalized insights. At a high level:

  • Bank transactions are pulled via Plaid and stored in a PostgreSQL database
  • Machine learning models classify emotional spending and forecast financial stress
  • LLM (GPT-4) generates personalized habit plans and weekly summaries
  • A nudge engine delivers behavior-based push notifications through FastAPI
  • All insights surface in the mobile app in real time, with coaching tailored to each user

Figma Handoff

I handed off completed designs to developers for implementation prioritizing clear communication, detailed specifications, and ongoing support to ensure developers can accurately build the product as intended.

QA

I partnered with front-end engineers to perform design QA, identifying and resolving UI bugs to deliver high-quality, production-ready interfaces.

TAKEAWAYS

What I Learned

  • Being flexible: we narrowed the scope or de-scoped multiple features to stay aligned with technical constraints and delivery timelines. I rapidly iterated on wireframes and flows to reflect updated goals and communicated trade-offs clearly, helping the team make informed decisions about what to cut, keep, or defer.
  • Advocating for user needs while working with very senior team members: I learned to confidently present design rationale backed by data and usability principles, while staying open to feedback and constraints. This required balancing assertiveness with collaboration, knowing when to push for user-centric solutions and when to adapt based on broader product or technical considerations.
  • Compromise is part of collaboration: Not every design detail made it to implementation, and that was okay. I learned to prioritize what mattered most for the user and collaborate on workarounds when ideal solutions weren’t feasible.