Nido
Making personal finance better easier.
Nido is a two year old project that still holds a special place in my portfolio. Not just because it is my first side project in the software and product space. But because the problem space is deeply interesting to me, and 2 years later, no one has still solved it yet (at least in India, despite all the tech and product talent)
What is the problem statement?
When a society revolves around capitalism and consumerism, money should be freely discussed and managed, taught in school curriculums. Sadly, we cannot change societies overnight, but we can make this dreadful task of managing money easier. People new to money are overwhelmed by the complexity of finances this leads them to not taking actionable steps to manage their money.
How did you solve it?
There are many ways to solve a problem, be it with technology, business or design. For this problem as well, there are multiple ways to go about solving it. I chose to tackle the user behaviour using design and psychology to create habit change. Automating was my way of answering this by solving for the mundane tasks of personal finance, and opening it to the interesting parts such as "How much did I spend on takeway food this year?"
It was my very first side project in the digital product/software domain. It was an exploration in product thinking, micro-interactions, design in general.
What process did I follow?
Nothing specific, over the years my process has boiled down to two simple steps.
1. Collect: Problems, ideas, user feedback, internet browsing, inspiration, thoughts.
2. Create: Wireframes, sketchnotes, instant ramen, interfaces, prototypes, visuals.
This runs in a cyclic manner until the result is desirable or I run out of caffeine.
But what about this…
The project is 2 years old and does not reflect my current knowledge and expertise in design. The typography is wonky, product suffers from featuritis, I completely missed out on cash transactions due to my own biases (I don't use cash) and many other flaws.
In fact I plan to work on 2.0 in the future, hit me up if you want to collaborate on this.
