Ledger

Overview

Product

Conversational personal finance concept

Client

Self-directed exploration

Role

Product & interaction designer

Timeline

3 months, Feb – Apr 2026

Responsibilities

Concept development, Conversation design, Motion & prototyping, Interaction design

Problem

Dashboards answer questions nobody asked

Most personal finance apps default to a wall of charts: spending by category, balance over time, budget progress bars. The actual question a person has in the moment — 'can I afford this?', 'why was this month different?' — usually requires mentally reassembling three separate charts to answer.

This concept started from a simple bet: if the interface let you ask the question directly, most of the dashboard becomes unnecessary.

Challenge

Making a conversational interface feel precise, not vague

Chat-shaped finance tools tend to feel evasive — a paragraph where a number should be. The challenge was designing responses that read as conversational but resolve to something as exact as a dashboard would show, using motion to connect the question to the specific data it pulled from.

Because this is a concept rather than a shipped product, the design had to carry its own credibility: every interaction needed to demonstrate the idea clearly enough to argue for itself without a live backend behind it.

Approach

Concept

Sketched a dozen everyday financial questions and worked backward from each answer to what interface element would need to exist to show it.

Conversation design

Wrote response patterns that always land on a specific figure or a specific chart fragment, never a vague summary — the conversational tone is in the framing, not in the data.

Motion & prototyping

Built high-fidelity motion prototypes in which the answer visibly assembles from underlying transaction data, so the interface shows its work rather than asserting a number.