OVERVIEW
With UPI making payments as easy as a single tap, spending money has never been faster, or harder to keep track of. Despite the explosion of digital transactions, most Indians still rely on memory, a quick glance at their bank balance, or a manually maintained Excel sheet to manage their finances.
The RBI's 2023-24 Report on Currency and Finance warns that while digitalisation improves financial accessibility, it raises concerns about impulsive spending behaviour. The habit of spending has outpaced the habit of budgeting.
Existing budgeting apps haven't bridged this gap ; they demand painstaking manual entry, struggle with UPI and bank linking, and bury users in cluttered interfaces. As someone who has lived this frustration firsthand, this project is rooted in the belief that better financial tools can meaningfully change how Indians relate to their money.
PROJECT BRIEF
Problem & Goal
Statements, IA
Pain Points &
Key Solutions
Detailed mockups
at feature level
Usability Tests &
Feedback
Explorations through
wireframes
Young urban Indians between the ages of 18 and 39 ; salaried professionals, early-career entrepreneurs, and students struggle to build consistent money management habits despite a genuine desire to understand and control their day-to-day spending. A question we've all asked ourselves at some point: where did my money even go?
Existing tools fail them in three key ways :
Manual entry cannot keep pace with the speed of digital spending.
Automated syncing is either unreliable or met with privacy distrust.
Interfaces are cluttered, ad-heavy, and built around rigid spending categories that don't reflect how Indians actually spend their money.
Sorted was designed to bridge this gap ; effortless capture, genuine privacy, and spending clarity built for the way Indians actually live.
To understand real spending behaviour, I floated a Google Form across 35 respondents from diverse age groups and professions; students, early and senior stage career professionals. I also personally spoke to people around me to go beyond survey data and understand the nuance behind the numbers.
68%
find manual entry too
tedious to maintain
USER PERSONAS
BUDGET
Clear view of income vs spent. Multiple income accounts can be added.
2. Limits as progress bars; gentle alert
when close to full limit.
Trends show spending analysis across time, category & accounts. Goals for long term savings.
PROFILE & SETTINGS
SMS auto read toggle; can be changed by user anytime.
Google drive backup on device for complete privacy.
Categories can be edited anytime offering full flexibility.
Tested with a senior UX designer and PM. The detailed feedback and conversations surfaced three meaningful changes across feature scope, structure, and interaction flow.
It's the end of the day. Auto-sync has been quietly tracking. Nandini logs a cash expense, cleans up an unknown merchant, and notices her food budget is almost up.
Onboarding was kept deliberately light. Users make one choice upfront, sync or manual, and the app suggests a starting set of categories based on Indian spending habits. By the time they hit home, the app already feels set up before they've done anything.
II. HOME DASHBOARD
From user research, it was clear that the home screen should answer one simple question when you open the app - where am I this month? Users cared most about their balance, visual spending summary, significant expenses, and whether they were close to any limits. Every element is tappable and reveals deeper information, but the surface stays clean, not overwhelming.
III. PERSISTENT ACROSS ALL TABS
Quick add was deemed to be an all accessible feature from everywhere- available for manual entry users as well as to log any remaining cash expenses for automated users. Profile houses features like categories, and link accounts. privacy toggles like auto read and drive backup provide financial privacy.
III. TRANSACTIONS
Onboarding was kept deliberately light. Users make one choice upfront, sync or manual, and the app suggests a starting set of categories based on Indian spending habits. By the time they hit home, the app already feels set up before they've done anything.
IV. BUDGET
The budget tab gives users a clear picture of how they're managing their money, tracking their spending against self-set limits, with automated trend charts, insights, and month-on-month comparisons. Everything updates automatically as transactions come in.
SUCCESS METRICS
If the application was to go live, I would gauge its success based on the following KPIs:
% of users completing onboarding without dropping off
Daily active usage rate (are people opening it regularly)
% of transactions auto-categorised correctly
User retention at 30 days (the point where a habit either forms or doesn't)
FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS
Sorted focused deeply on spending clarity, understanding where money goes as the first step toward financial wellness. The natural next step would be saving clarity, a dedicated space for goals, investment tracking, and long-term planning, designed with the same level of intentionality.
AI auto-categorisation is only as good as the underlying data it works with. Inconsistent merchant naming in India's UPI ecosystem puts a real ceiling on accuracy, a challenge shared across every app in this space. Future iterations would explore merchant data partnerships or crowdsourced correction to close this gap.
A premium analytics tier is another area worth exploring - curated financial content, deeper spending breakdowns, and export tools for users who want to go further, kept entirely separate from the core experience.
REFLECTIONS
This was my first UX case study, and coming from an architecture background, the process felt more familiar than I expected; both disciplines start with understanding how people move through a space, whether physical or digital.
The most challenging part was translating what people say they need into what actually makes sense to design. User research, constant feedback, and mapping out flows kept the decisions grounded. It was a good reminder that the person using the space always knows more than the person who designed it.