2025-10-03
Daniel Hartman
Design Dispatch, New York
When the jury behind the Future Forward Award announced its 2025 winners, one name stood out for both the ambition and the impact of her work: Joanna Yoon, a UX designer whose project, EconoSense, is transforming the way people understand their financial world.
The Future Forward Award, presented annually, is not a typical design competition. It seeks to uncover the authentic, the innovative, and the boundary-pushing—from creatives around the globe who are redefining what design can achieve. In recognizing Yoon, the award highlights not only a striking piece of design but also a project with the potential to change lives.
“Finance touches everyone,” Yoon says. “But too often, it’s locked behind jargon, dense reports, and intimidating charts. I wanted to design something that feels like a conversation, not a lecture.”
For many people, economic news is background noise. Headlines about inflation, tax shifts, or central bank decisions often feel too abstract, detached from the realities of daily life. Yet, as Yoon discovered during her years as a fintech UX designer, these very shifts have tangible consequences—whether on the price of groceries, student loan repayments, or the value of retirement savings.
In her work designing complex analytics tools for bankers and risk analysts, she noticed the gulf between professional financial intelligence and what the general public could access. “I realized finance shouldn’t just be for those with the right education or insider access,” she reflects. “The same quality of insight should be available to anyone.”
That realization became the seed for EconoSense—a mobile experience built to strip away intimidation and instead deliver clarity, context, and confidence.
What makes EconoSense remarkable, and ultimately award-winning, is its ability to personalize economic data in a way that feels intuitive. Users begin by creating a Smart Finance Profile—entering key details such as income, savings, and long-term goals. Using this context, EconoSense’s AI system filters news stories and translates them into clear, personal insights.
A rise in interest rates isn’t explained through abstract percentages but in how it might affect a user’s mortgage payments. A story about inflation isn’t reduced to vague economic anxiety but translated into what it could mean for grocery budgets or travel savings.
The platform also includes interactive learning modules, which reframe intimidating concepts into approachable lessons. Instead of dense textbooks, users encounter visuals, real-world scenarios, and conversational explanations. During beta testing, over 80% of users reported a clearer understanding of financial concepts after just one module, while the app’s unusually high 92% completion rate suggested that people not only understood but stayed engaged.
Before Future Forward, Yoon had already caught the attention of international juries. EconoSense earned accolades at the London Design Awards, French Design Awards, and the New York Product Design Awards, each celebrating its blend of data science precision and human-centered accessibility.
But the Future Forward Award represents something different. It isn’t just about execution or aesthetics; it’s about vision. It seeks projects that dare to reimagine the future of design itself. For the jury, EconoSense exemplified this ethos by making financial literacy—a subject many avoid—engaging, inclusive, and actionable.
“Future Forward is about spotlighting creativity that can change the way we live,” the organizers noted. “Joanna’s EconoSense embodies this mission by turning intimidating economic data into personal knowledge that empowers.”
For Yoon, the recognition is validation, but it’s also a call to action. She is already in discussions with nonprofits, schools, and community organizations to expand the reach of EconoSense. Her goal is to localize the platform into multiple languages and adapt it for different cultural contexts, particularly for immigrant communities who are often underserved by mainstream financial tools.
“Financial literacy is empowerment,” she says. “If design can help someone feel in control of their money—and their future—it’s doing more than delivering a good experience. It’s changing lives.”
This ethos aligns perfectly with Future Forward’s mission. By honoring Yoon, the award underscores the growing role of design not just in aesthetics or usability, but in reshaping access to knowledge and opportunity.
Yoon’s trajectory reflects a broader shift in the design world, where projects are increasingly measured not only by their innovation but by their social impact. In a time of economic turbulence—when tariff shifts, inflation spikes, and market volatility dominate the headlines—tools like EconoSense provide something invaluable: clarity.
Clarity, however, is not just about simplifying charts or rephrasing jargon. It’s about helping people connect the dots between distant policy decisions and their everyday lives. It’s about empowerment in moments that often feel overwhelming. And it’s about designing for the people who are too often left out of the conversation.
By winning the Future Forward Award, Joanna Yoon has joined a small but significant circle of creatives whose work points toward what design can achieve at its best. Not simply sleeker interfaces or more efficient workflows, but bridges—bridges between headlines and households, between data and decision-making, between uncertainty and empowerment.
As Yoon looks ahead, the Future Forward recognition gives her a global platform from which to amplify her mission. She envisions a future where financial literacy tools like EconoSense are as common and trusted as language-learning apps or fitness trackers.
In the meantime, her win serves as both inspiration and proof of concept: that design rooted in empathy can address systemic gaps, and that creative vision, when coupled with social purpose, can change not only industries but also individual lives.
Through EconoSense and her Future Forward Award, Joanna Yoon has shown what it means to truly live up to the name of the honor: to design not just for today, but for the future.