Mindful Barclays

Providing a unique opportunity for Barclays

This mobile application concept originated as an academic senior UX course project, later submitted to the D&AD New Blood Awards. Barclays provided the design brief, seeking provocative concepts addressing the intersection of mental health and money management.

How can Barclays help vulnerable customers manage their money better?

We reframed this for our audience: "For those students vulnerable with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) who constantly suffer from uncontrollable worry, debts are another mental burden for them, dropping them into a negative cycle of debt and worsening mental health."

The focus on anxiety — and on students specifically — wasn't arbitrary. Post-secondary institutions are deeply target-driven environments: GPA thresholds, scholarship conditions, internship deadlines, graduation timelines. That constant pressure creates a baseline of stress that leaves students far more susceptible to anxiety than the general population. When debt enters the picture on top of that, it doesn't feel like a financial problem — it feels like one more thing they're failing at.

Two root causes driving our design direction

We created Mia — a persona representing the target user's everyday struggles with anxiety and financial stress — to ground all design decisions in her reality.

Grounded in Barclays' own ambitions

By carefully considering Barclays' long-term business strategy, Mindful Barclays is a financial wellbeing application that helps students with GAD develop knowledge and confidence when approaching debts — by learning financial literacy through digestible information, and understanding their thoughts and feelings through mindful activities. It sits at the intersection of what Barclays said they wanted to be, and what their most vulnerable customers actually needed.

Keeping mental health at the forefront

Design choices were deliberately calming: abstract human imagery to help users with anxiety create personal connections, warm/cool pastel gradients for branding identity, and Gotham Rounded — a casual, relaxed typeface — for all copy.

Greyscale wireframes established interaction flow before visual design, keeping structure and aesthetics cleanly separated.

Three features, one mindset shift

"I Believe I Can Do It" — Changing How They Think

Encourages university students with GAD to challenge pre-existing assumptions about money through assumption-breaking activities, enabling confident debt thinking.

"I Know How To Do It" — Changing How They Learn

Proactively delivers interactive financial activities in card-based digestible sections. Prevents tunnel vision and embarrassment through accessible information design. Clear CTAs redirect users to specific Barclays resources for practical application.

"I Feel Less Stressed" — Changing How They Feel

Integrates scheduled meditation breaks during and after financial topics, acknowledging that anxious students can focus for approximately 30 minutes. Evening backgrounds represent typical study completion times and promote mental ease before sleep.

Let research lead, not assumptions

The team scrapped initial ideas multiple times to let research guide the solution naturally and avoid design attachment. This reinforced the critical importance of grounding solutions and features in research and rationale to create strong user-centered products with maximum real-world impact.

Unlike market competitors focusing on earning more money, this solution balanced both financial and mental wellbeing — leveraging Barclays' access to client financial data to identify and target students displaying risky financial behaviors.