When Ellis and I started building SFMe, the first thing we did was not open Figma or write a single line of Flutter. We sat down and talked about money. About what it felt like to check your bank account the week before student finance came in. About the spreadsheet tricks, the mental gymnastics, the low-key anxiety that lives in the background when you are a student trying to make things work.
That conversation became the foundation of everything we built. Not a feature list — a feeling. The feeling we wanted SFMe to fix.
Start with the feeling, not the feature
Most budgeting apps are built for people who already like thinking about money. They are full of graphs, categories, projections, and dashboards. They assume that if you give someone more data, they will feel more in control. But that is not how it works for most students.
More data, without clarity, just creates more anxiety. So we asked a different question: what would it feel like to open this app and immediately know you are okay? Or, if you are not okay, to know exactly why — simply, without judgment?
Designing for real behaviour
Students do not budget in advance. They check after the fact. They want to know: did I spend too much on food this week? How much is left until the end of the month? Can I afford this? These are simple questions that most apps bury under layers of setup and manual input.
SFMe is built around those questions. The interface answers them immediately — before you have to go looking. That is the work of empathy: not adding features, but removing distance.
The best design is the kind that feels like it already knew what you needed.
What we are still learning
We shipped an early version of SFMe to a small group of students and got the kind of feedback that makes you simultaneously excited and humbled. Some things worked exactly as intended. Others did not survive contact with real users at all. That is the process — and we are grateful for every piece of it.
If you want to follow along as we build, the journal is the best place to do it. We will keep writing about what we are learning, what we are changing, and why.