Case Study | Money Mirror Prototype
Emotional Design | INFO-651 | Pratt Institute, Spring 2026
Money Mirror: Designing a Fintech App That Treats Spending as a Human Experience
The Cycle No Budgeting App Was Designed to Address
Most people do not overspend because they are irresponsible. They overspend because they are human. That was the premise my team started with when we set out to design Money Mirror, a reflective fintech journaling app for an emotional design course at Pratt Institute.
The financial anxiety landscape in the US gave us plenty to work with. According to a 2024 Discover survey, 80% of Americans report anxiety about their finances. Capital One research found that money is the number one source of stress in Americans' lives, outranking work, politics, and family combined. And yet the tools available to people trying to understand their relationship with money are almost entirely transactional: they track what you spent, when you spent it, and how much. None of them ask why.
What existing fintech tools miss is the emotional layer, the social comparison that sent someone scrolling before the purchase, the stress of a bad week, the brief hit of forward motion that a confirmation email provides. They also fail to account for how differently shame lands across users. For someone with low financial literacy, the avoidance response to a negative balance isn't irresponsibility; it's self-protection. An app that greets that moment with a warning or a red number is introducing shame exactly when the user is least equipped to receive it.
Our design goal was to build something different: not a monitor, but a mirror. A tool that returns a user's own words and patterns to them without attaching a verdict.
Designing for the Feeling , then the Feature
My team mapped our users before we designed anything. I led the development of four affective personas positioned along two axes that conventional fintech almost never considers: financial literacy and financial means.
Alexis, 24, is a marketing coordinator with low literacy and low means. She grew up in a household where money meant scarcity, not planning, and she's never successfully onboarded to a budgeting app because the setup screens alone made her feel unqualified. Shame arrives fast for her, and she has neither the vocabulary nor the margin to buffer it.
James, 31, is financially literate and comfortable. He knows the numbers. He just avoids the why. He has a spreadsheet and a savings account and still overspends emotionally, because the consequences are affordable enough to rationalize.
Marisol, 28, is a first-gen American with high literacy and low means. She built that literacy through necessity, not interest, and it costs her. Her emotional spending pattern isn't excess, it's deprivation: the quiet resentment of choosing not to buy something for herself, of absorbing a family cost without naming it.
Donna, 47, is a primary caregiver with comfortable means and low literacy. She buys things for her kids without hesitation, then second-guesses a $40 purchase for herself. The financial system hasn't punished her the way it's punished others, so her patterns go unnamed.
These four personas shaped every design decision that followed. Working closely with Alexis as our anchor user, I developed an emotional journey map tracing a scenario I called "The Wednesday Purchase," following her from the payday high through a stress-triggered impulse buy, the guilt of seeing the charge two days later, and the quiet reset she performs before the next paycheck arrives. The map identified five touchpoints where the app needed to meet her, and established what tone, friction level, and interaction style each moment required.
From there, the team built a seven-screen prototype in Figma. Key decisions included: a warm parchment palette and serif typography to signal a reflective space before a word was read; an onboarding screen that led with emotional language rather than features ("Not a budget app. A spending diary that helps you understand the why behind what you buy"); a purchase logging flow that asked three questions (how were you feeling, what was going on, did it help?) with emoji as a primary and valid entry point; and a strict no-scores, no-red-states design philosophy grounded in Brene Brown's research on shame and Turkle's framing of reflective tools.
For testing, we evaluated the prototype through Don Norman's three-level framework: visceral (first impressions, aesthetic response), behavioral (navigation, friction, interaction), and reflective (meaning-making after use). We conducted four live sessions, each structured around a set of questions probing all three levels. Participants were recruited to represent a range of relationships with money, from those with active budgeting practices to those who had never used a financial tool. Our central test question wasn't whether users could navigate the prototype. It was whether they felt safe enough to be honest inside it.
The Concept Held
The emotional foundation held across all four participants. Every tester, regardless of background or financial habit, reported feeling no judgment from the app. That finding was consistent and unprompted: participants distinguished Money Mirror from Mint, Rocket Money, and similar tools without being asked to. One described it as being "like being hugged, being told it's ok over and over again." Another said the UI felt "calming, not too judgey," with room to be intentional without feeling alarmed.
The essential vs. emotional spending distinction was the most discussed feature. Participants immediately grasped why rent and a stress purchase shouldn't be treated the same way, and they felt respected by the distinction. The reflective phase produced the deepest responses. One participant moved visibly from shame toward what she called grace, not because the app told her she was doing well, but because it gave her space to hear herself. She described the act of logging as self-encouragement, which is precisely what Lieberman's affect labeling research would predict: naming an emotion before acting on it shifts processing from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex. This participant was experiencing that shift in real time.
Friction points clustered around execution rather than concept. Copy on the welcome screen confused at least two participants, particularly the essential versus emotional labels, which needed clearer context before they felt trustworthy. One participant flagged grammar errors on the opening screen; in a tool asking users to be vulnerable, surface-level polish carries more emotional weight than it would anywhere else. A fixed emoji set felt limiting for users whose emotional vocabulary didn't map neatly onto the provided options. And once trust was established, participants wanted more control: multi-select intentions at payday, custom emoji, expanded filters.
The key finding was clarifying: every friction point was a copy or flexibility problem. None of them were design philosophy problems.
For the second prototype, my contributions focused on copy revision across the welcome screen and the essential-spend branch, refining the feature row language to be benefit-led rather than abstract, and sharpening the intention-setting copy to hold the complexity of real financial motivation. The team also added multi-select intentions, introduced a custom emoji field, reordered the insights screen to surface the most emotionally compelling pattern first, and expanded the entries view to show more history and make cumulative reflection legible.
The Gap Between Knowing and Changing
The final prototype was presented to the class at the end of the spring 2026 semester. Peer and faculty response affirmed the sharpness of the essential versus emotional distinction as a structural concept and noted the specificity of the persona work as an unusual strength, particularly the decision to position Marisol as someone for whom the emotionally significant financial moment is often not a purchase at all, but a deprivation.
If the project were to continue, the most pressing next step would be longitudinal testing: understanding whether Money Mirror actually changes spending behavior over time, or whether it surfaces awareness without producing change. The look-back feature, which places a user's first and most recent journal entries side by side, was designed specifically to make that arc visible. But a single prototype session can't test something that requires weeks of use.
The larger question the project left me with is one we surfaced in our speculative framing: can warmth survive monetization? Every design decision we made was in service of a relationship between the user and their own emotional honesty. That relationship is fragile in ways that most fintech products never have to think about, because most fintech products don't ask anything of their users at that level. The insight Money Mirror offers, the experience of being seen without being judged, is also exactly the kind of thing that could be weaponized by a product that decides emotional data is a revenue stream.
The gap between knowing and changing is almost never filled by more information. Money Mirror was a project about filling it with something else: the feeling of being understood, on your own terms, whenever you're ready to begin.