Mimi’s Treasure
A financial app that rewards users with value-aligned collectibles as they make progress toward their financial goals.
Our goal was to help young adults early in their careers set meaningful financial goals and build long-term money habits. We wanted to give them a fun, lighthearted way to stay motivated and make financial choices that actually align with their values.
Role
Product Designer
Team
1 Product Manager
2 UX Researcher
1 Product Designer
Timeline
Aug 25 - Dec 25
problem
Engaging with personal finances often triggers anxiety and defensive avoidance in young professionals.
Traditional approaches to improve financial behavior have focused primarily on increasing financial literacy. However, current solutions (e.g. budgeting tools) cultivate users to engage out of guilt or obligation rather than genuine interest, leading to unsustainable behavior change. Individuals motivated by genuine personal values, or autonomous motivation, achieve significantly better financial outcomes than those who act out of pressure or obligation, or controlled motivation.
Process
After interviewing our target users and expert consults, we followed an iterative design process with three rounds of prototype testing.
Our design address these shortcomings by integrating gamified features that are identity-affirming with value-based goal setting, a system where rewards directly reflect users’ personal financial identities and aspirations. At the core of our design lies Self-Affirmation Theory, which demonstrates that reflecting on personal values reduces defensiveness and increases openness to potentially threatening information.
Here are our core takeaways from each step:
Round 1:
Users need consistent guidance + timely feedback as core emotional motivators
Connect goals to personal identity creates a stronger sense of attachment
Round 2:
Logging process should support lump sum entries instead of daily contributions
Adjust the app’s tone to enhance financial credibility but warm and inviting
Round 3:
Need clearer visibility of collections and sense of immediacy receiving rewards
Map the user journey against the Fogg Behavior Model (B=M A P) to identify where motivation, ability, and triggers can be further optimized
Solution
Mimi’s Treasure connects users’ personal values and goals to a narrative-driven journey with Mimi the cat, rewarding progress with meaningful digital collectibles instead of guilt-driven alerts.
Here are our
Goal-setting
Personalizing each flow through survey of user’s goal and current values
Leverages cognitive dissonance to strengthen behavioral follow-through
Logging Progress
User manually logs each small to big progress they have made
Tracking progress strengthen attachment to a goal and reduce willingness to abandon it through endowment effect, they “own” future outcomes
Post-Logging
After logging enough progress, Mimi is free to explore outside world
Employ psychological distancing by framing the goal as helping Mimi the cat's adventures
Reward Retrieval
Mimi comes back (notification + widget on the home screen) with a souvenir from her trip, which are collectables directly related to user’s goal (e.g. user goal is “saving up for a trip” their collectables will be traveling related)
