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Popular consumer apps like Yahoo Weather are setting a high bar for mobile app design. The following six companies are role models of sorts for the ideal user experience.

Image: Thinkstock
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Simple Adds Photos to Transactions

Simple, a digital financial services startup that's being acquired by BBVA Compass, sports a number of features that bankers praise. One lets users attach images and documents to transactions, transforming mobile banking apps into gatekeepers of memories. Simple also helps the feature will drive engagement.
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Moven Offers Financial Health Alerts

Moven, a mobile-first financial service tied to a debit card, lets customers track spending in categories like food. It works by tallying card swipes and sending out mobile notifications. The feature is part of a broader trend in helping consumers keep tabs on discretionary spending.
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Numbrs Aims to Visualize Spending

Numbrs, a German startup that plans to launch service in the U.S. this year offers a way for users to visualize future purchases. Its app predicts what a user's finances will look like down the road by analyzing historical income and spending patterns. Eventually, Numbrs may upgrade the algorithm-supported app so that users can tap to buy products of interest.
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Level Money Simplifies the Cash Balance

The San Francisco startup is designing software targeted at enabling millennials to see, via simple visuals of linked financial accounts, how much they can safely spend in a given day, week or month.
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Bank of the West Discards the Login

Bank of the West of San Francisco was one of the first banks to enable customers retrieve account balances without logging in-a particularly welcome feature on small smartphones.
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Yahoo Makes Fun of the Weather

Yahoo! Weather pulls in imagery from Flickr (another Yahoo! Property) to show what the weather looks like in specific locations. Bradley Leimer, who leads digital strategy at Mechanics Bank in Richmond, Calif., suggests that It banks consider incorporating similarly pleasurable design features.
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