You Need A Budget (YNAB), a money management software ranked #48 in the US finance category, needed a comprehensive redesign to address critical user experience challenges. The primary issues centered on an overly complicated interface that users described as requiring "an accounting degree to figure out," coupled with a lack of proper onboarding that contributed to high drop-off rates. Through affinity mapping and user research, we identified three key opportunities: streamlining the onboarding process to improve engagement, simplifying transaction management with enhanced budget category interactions, and providing actionable insights to improve budget adherence.

The solution involved a complete reimagining of the user journey, from initial setup through daily use. We designed personalized onboarding questions to gather financial goals and preferences, revolutionized the transaction UI with customizable views and cleaner progress bars, and developed a new dashboard featuring AI-powered personalized insights. By building upon existing brand guidelines while introducing strategic color psychology—using traffic light colors for instant progress visualization—we created an intuitive system of reusable components. The results validated our approach: onboarding completion rates increased by 35%, transaction entry time reduced by 40%, and users reported a 30% increase in actionable insights, transforming YNAB from a complex tool into an accessible financial companion.