Liquid
Helping people with dyscalculia pay confidently in cash - Swift Student Challenge 2026.
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Solo Design & Dev
- Stack
- SwiftUISketchPixelmator
Concepts I've been exposed to
01
Desk research
02
Digital drawing on iPad
03
Studying financial cultures
What is Liquid?
Liquid is my submission for the Swift Student Challenge 2026! …but also this time, sadly, I was not selected as a winner!
It is an app designed to help people with dyscalculia when paying in cash, both when handing over the correct amount of money and when receiving change.
Dyscalculia is a neurodevelopmental learning disorder that affects the ability to process and understand mathematical concepts, thus also affecting the ability to spend money.
During my research I understood that people affected by dyscalculia have problems with payments, handling changes and understanding the value of money, leading to dangerous money management and delegating payments completely to digital methods.
With Liquid, I want to address all those problems, helping dyscalculic people to feel confident and safe, neutralizing the difficulties of the disorder to give them something that for me is super super powerful: the choice of paying with any method they want, not with the one they can.
What did I learn from this experience?
This journey, honestly, was awesome.
I started thinking about the idea of helping dyscalculic people in payments for the first time in late November 2025 and started actually developing it from December 2025.
Since I wanted this concept to be also my submission for the Swift Student Challenge 2026, I made sure to be informed enough about the topic with some deep research, focusing mainly on the voice of people who are affected by dyscalculia, navigating through subreddits where people shared their struggles, difficulties and frustrations.
Liquid's development took four months and I learned a lot from it.
For example, I had to document myself about financial culture and how other countries currencies work, what is the circulation of banknotes of other currencies: which ones are used the most, and which ones are instead out of use? To make a product enjoyable for as many communities as possible, I had to put myself in the shoes of people who use a currency different from the one I'm used to, which is the euro.
It was so fun, I also asked people around the Apple Developer Academy to talk about their currencies and show me their money in order to understand and learn!
But that's not everything! For the first time, since I wanted to create something all by myself and wanted to give a style completely mine to the app, I combined Pixelmator (for hand-drawing complex details) with Sketch for the core structure of banknotes and coins!
All the assets of the money in the app are done by me and I'm super happy and proud of how they came out! That was my first time drawing assets for an app like that!
Attitude in the project
Care for details.
I wanted everything to be exactly as I wanted.
Since the experience was designed to help people, I paid close attention to every detail:
- refining banknotes and coins for easy recognition (key to replacing abstract math concepts);
- creating a clear, visually pleasing interface that follows Liquid Glass design principles;
- writing a clear onboarding to let people understand how easy it is to use Liquid.