Overview
CubWallet is a digital ledger app designed to teach kids healthy money habits through hands-on experience without transferring actual money. By turning chores into earning opportunities, allowing kids to set savings goals, and giving parents full oversight as "the bank," CubWallet bridges the gap between digital management and real-world financial literacy.
As the Lead UI/UX Designer, I redesigned a dual-experience mobile ecosystem that balances a simple, playful interface for young kids with a streamlined, secure dashboard for parents.
Tools used: Figma, Claude Code
Problem
While CubWallet aimed to build financial literacy for kids, the legacy app suffered from complex navigation and a multi-step chore approval process. Parents found managing daily allowances tedious, leading to high friction and drop-off, while kids struggled with an unengaging visual hierarchy.
Goal: Redesign the core user flows to reduce parental task completion time, eliminate visual clutter, and create an intuitive, gamified experience for kids.
Audit and Analysis
Friction Point 1: Mismatched Mental Models (Kid View)
Finding: Kids had to perform an extra, unintuitive step: manually transferring digital allowance into specific "Jars" (e.g., Spending, Saving, Giving) before they could request a purchase or mark a goal as funded.
Impact: Users found the multi-step ledger mechanic confusing, often thinking their earned money had "disappeared" when it wasn't immediately available in their main spend balance.
Friction Point 2 - High Task Overhead (Parent View)
Finding: Parents took an average of 4–5 taps per child just to approve completed chores.
Impact: High drop-off in weekly allowance tracking.
Friction Point 3: High Cognitive Load & Redundant Controls (Parent View)
Finding: Cluttered with redundant quick-action buttons, duplicate navigation paths, and ambiguous labels. For families with two or more children, the interface became extremely bloated.
Impact: Busy parents found the interface overwhelming due to unnecessary information and scattered, redundant controls. Instead of getting a quick overview, they spent extra time filtering through visual clutter just to find basic management tools, leading to low app engagement and delayed chore approvals.
Rethinking the Flow: High-Friction UI vs. Redesigned UI
Here is how I transformed high-friction legacy flows into intuitive, scalable experiences using a side-by-side breakdown of key screens.
Friction Point 1: Mismatched Mental Models (Kid View)
Legacy Layout (Before)
Redesigned Layout (After)
Friction Point 2 - High Task Overhead (Parent View)
Legacy Layout (Before)
Redesigned Layout (After)
Friction Point 3: High Cognitive Load & Redundant Controls (Parent View)
Legacy Layout (Before)
Redesigned Layout (After)
Validating the Design & Expected Impact
Direct Task Success: 100% of participants successfully located and completed a request on their first attempt using the unified tab.
Navigation Friction: 0 out of 5 users misclicked or reported confusion around primary actions (compared to 4/5 on the legacy UI).
Perceived Usability: Users highlighted the visual coin stack as the most motivating element, noting it made tracking money feel "rewarding and effortless."
Key Takeaway: The streamlined hierarchy successfully eliminated choice paralysis and validated the swipe-gesture placement for secondary tasks.