Re:ceipt
Mobile budget-tracking designed to help young adults develop sustainable financial literacy through eco-friendly purchase suggestions.
2025
UX Designer
Product Design, UX Research
Casey Lee
The Problem
Your early twenties are when money habits set. As young adults face pressure to spend socially, wasteful consumption patterns emerge and tend to persist for decades.
The Solution
Re:ceipt embeds sustainable suggestions directly where people track their spending, with a positive reinforcement strategy informed by user research.
User Research
To better understand the financial and sustainability behaviors of young adults, we surveyed 31 students and recent graduates (aged 18–26). Our questions aimed to identify blockers preventing mindful consumption.
The two biggest blockers were convenience (42%) and cost (39%).
68% rated themselves above a 5 out of 10 on sustainability. Almost none of them could actually see the impact of what they bought.
Overspending showed up most in eating out (90%), clothing (42%), and subscriptions (29%).
Key Design Decisions
→ Social Influence. People spend to keep up with their friends. Instead of fighting that, we used it. The community features reward the sustainable choices.
→ Rejecting Shame Culture. Users responded better to empowerment over strict accountability. We shaped Re:ceipt's messaging to focus on positive, achievable steps rather than highlighting failures.
→ Providing Educational Value. None of the banking apps we looked at said a word about sustainability, and our users stated a lack of motivation to research it themselves, so we built the learning directly into the app.
Outcomes
Won the New Designer Award at the Cornell UX Design-a-thon after presenting our work to a live panel of industry design leaders.
Takeaways
→ Targeting two forms of sustainability in one product could have introduced scope creep quickly. Keeping the research tightly scoped is what helped us maintain the core purpose of the application.
→ Working asynchronously 300 miles apart required high-level communication and trust between designers.
Retrospective
→ The visual hierarchy needs development. Certain elements compete with others for attention or distract from the contents of the app.
→ Sustainability scores go out of date as companies evolve. In production we'd need a real process to keep them up to date, or risk eroding user trust.