Pulse
Your money has patterns. Pulse helps you understand why.
Overview
Most finance apps treat money like math. They count it, categorize it, and send you a notification when you've spent too much. But money isn't just a number it's one of the most emotionally loaded parts of our lives. We spend when we're stressed. We avoid checking our balance when we're scared. We feel guilty after impulse purchases, then do it again two weeks later.
Pulse is a concept I designed to explore what it would look like if a finance app actually acknowledged that. Not just what you spend, but how you feel when you spend it and what that pattern reveals about you over time.
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THE PROBLEM
I've tried Mint. I've tried YNAB. I've tried just not looking. None of it stuck, and I kept wondering why. The apps were functional they tracked everything correctly. But they made me feel judged, not understood. Every overspend became a red bar. Every category was a verdict.
That frustration became a design question: Why do apps that are supposed to reduce financial anxiety often make it worse?
I started paying attention to how the people around me talked about money. Not budgets — but the feeling of checking a bank account. The specific dread of an unexpected charge. The way a stressful week at work somehow ends with $80 in food delivery and a vague sense of guilt.
There was clearly something here that existing apps were ignoring entirely.
THE RESEARCH
To validate that this wasn't just my experience, I reached out to 20 people with a few direct questions about how they actually feel about money not how they budget, but how they feel.
The questions I asked:
What I learned
I also looked at what the research says more broadly. Financial anxiety is widespread studies show that 64% to 72% of Americans report money as their top source of stress. Yet the apps designed to help rarely address the emotional dimension at all. They optimize for accuracy, not for how a person actually relates to their finances.
COMPETITIVE AUDIT
I looked at the four most commonly used finance apps Mint, YNAB, Copilot, and Monarch through one specific lens:
Do they acknowledge how you feel?
None of them do. They all assume that if you can see your spending clearly enough, you'll change it. But that's not how behavior change works. Insight alone isn't enough especially when the insight makes you feel worse.
Design Principles
Before any wireframes, I set three principles that would guide every decision:
The app never tells you you're doing badly. It reflects patterns back without judgment to any users thoughout the journey
Adding a mood tag to a transaction should take 2 seconds. But the insight that comes from 3 weeks of those tags should feel meaningful.
not a calculator. The AI in Pulse doesn't just surface data it notices things, asks questions, and talks to you like a person who's been paying attention.
Wireframes helped me pressure-test the core flows before committing to any visual direction. The ring, the mood tag interaction, and the AI chat layout all changed significantly at this stage
Competitor analysis
Solution
Pulse - an emotional finance app.
#1
Dark, warm, not clinical. Finance apps default to white, blue, and green the visual language of banks and spreadsheets. Pulse uses a dark background with warm coral, sage, and lavender. It's meant to feel calm to open, not sterile.
Rough sketches of the early ideas
Final onboarding screens
Conversation over notification. The standard app interaction is: you do something → app judges it. Pulse inverts this. The AI surfaces patterns and invites you into a conversation. The language is deliberately warm and human not "You exceeded your food budget" but "Your happiest food spending is weekend brunch. Your most regretted is late-night delivery alone. Both are valid."
The ring instead of the bar chart. Most apps show spending as bar charts by category. The problem is that bar charts are comparative they make you immediately look for what's "too high." The ring is about the whole picture, not individual judgment. It also maps naturally to the emotional color coding in a way a bar chart can't.
#3
Screens
Rather than projecting false precision, here's what I'd track to validate the design decisions:
#4
Reflection
What I'd do differently with more time:
Pulse is a concept,
it hasn't been tested with real users at scale. If I were taking this further, the most important next step would be usability testing specifically around the mood-tagging interaction. The design assumes it's low-friction, but that assumption needs validation. I'd also want to explore the privacy angle more deeply asking people to log their emotional state alongside their financial data is a significant ask, the trust model needs to be airtight.
What this project taught me:
The most interesting design problems aren't about organizing information better they're about understanding what emotional relationship someone has with a system, and designing for that honestly. Pulse pushed me to think beyond screens and interactions into behavior, psychology, and what it actually takes for a product to earn someone's trust.
