Financial Planning Solutions for Caregivers
CuroNow - Financial Team
Designed a mobile interface that empowered family caregivers to take control of their own and their loved one's financials through clear, centralized financial support
Role
UX Designer
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Tools/Skills
Figma
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Team
3 UX Designers,
1 Project Manager
Duration
8 Weeks
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Overview
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CuroNow is a health-tech startup focused on easing the burden of caregiving. Their mobile app centralizes tasks, resources, and medical information so family caregivers can better manage their homes, finances, and time.​ My team was responsible for the financial experience - designing tools to help caregivers organize expenses, track reimbursements, manage budgets, and navigate insurance.
Project Timeline
The Problem Space
Navigating Financial Uncertainty While Caring for Someone Else
Caring for another person often means managing two financial worlds at once. Caregivers juggle unpredictable expenses, insurance paperwork, and shared budgets, and all while handling their own responsibilities.
Designing for Family Caregivers
Family caregivers often balance demanding jobs, loved ones’ health, and financial uncertainty. Our goal was to design tools that make managing caregiving finances simple, clear, and supportive.
They Were Managing Multiple lives and Many Sets of Finances
Working under a tight timeline and limited resources, we turned to online caregiver stories, community threads, and video diaries to uncover real-world challenges.
We then organized these insights through affinity mapping, journey mapping, and hypothesis testing, identifying consistent pain points and unmet needs. These voices painted a clear picture: caregivers weren’t just asking for another finance tracker:
They needed clarity, coordination, and peace of mind.
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Understanding Through Research
Research Insights
Key Themes We Noticed
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“I just wish there was one place where everything made sense.”
How Might We Statements
Bringing Structure to Uncertainty
We distilled our research into “How Might We” questions that guided our brainstorming and solutions. As a team, we conducted additional financial research on budgeting strategies, the tax management process, financial best practices and more so we could best create solutions that cognitive load and building emotional reassurance.
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From scattered tasks to one cohesive system
Early sketches explored ways to merge budgeting, insurance, and tax tasks under a single visual language. We tested multiple dashboard layouts, aiming for instant orientation a calm collective space rather than a flood of numbers.
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​​We decided to group information by mental model rather than data type: “What I need to track,” “what I need to pay,” “what’s coming up.”
This structure let caregivers switch from firefighting to planning.
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Designing personalization, not one-size-fits-all
​Our journey maps showed that financial needs and confidence varied widely between caregiver situations.
To address that, we introduced a personalized onboarding flow and caregivers identify their financial focus areas (budgeting, insurance, tax management) and comfort level.
Their dashboard then adapts to those selections an experience shaped around their stress points, not generic templates
Learning from Expert Feedback
After sharing our mid-fidelity prototypes, stakeholders challenged us to clarify who pays, better integrate the calendar, and support both caregiver and care recipient views​​
Their feedback reframed our design hierarchy. We prioritized time-sensitive actions, such as upcoming bills and reimbursements, integrated with the calendar, at the top of the dashboard, and made it clear who each task belonged to.
How Might We Statements
We also refined onboarding to establish whether the dashboard reflected the caregiver, the care recipient, or both, ensuring a more personalized experience. Finally, our payment and tax management features now specify who paid, how much they contributed, and what costs might be covered, adding clarity and reducing confusion during shared financial planning.
Final Prototypes
A Design That Lets Families Focus on Care, Not Calculations
The final solution combined empathy with structure to create a unified financial experience that lets caregivers act with confidence instead of confusion.
Feature Highlights
Learnings and Next Steps
“Designing for caregivers taught me that simplicity is a form of compassion.”
I learned to make research-based design decisions even without direct user access. The final experience reduced confusion around shared finances, replaced scattered tools with a single organized flow, and gave caregivers a clearer sense of control.
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Next steps: Extend testing with active caregivers, refine accessibility, and explore how education and guidance can be incorporated throughout the tool's processes.
