Leading the mobile interface redesign and experience revamp of a top African digital bank with over 1 million users.
Paylater was originally an online lending platform that provides short-term loans to help
cover unexpected expenses. As the app grew beyond offering loans, a new name and brand
refresh became imperative, these birthed Carbon!
After the identity rebrand was concluded by external consultants, there was an urgent need
to revamp the interface and experience of the app while capturing newly planned features
like free credit reports, investments, single transaction history, and wallet.
I mostly worked on the UX and visual design related tasks yet we worked closely as a team.
For the user research, we collaboratively came up with research questions. I ran the
sessions while my co-designer observed and took notes.
Groundwork: The project initially started with a huge list of UX fixes that
were already identified by the product managers on the Paylater app. While also listing out
the extra features that needed to launch with the rebranding initiative.
UX Lead (Consultant)
Jan - Jun, 2019
2 UX Designers
3 Product Managers
2 Android Engineers
2 QA Engineers
2 Key Stakeholders (Cofounders)
1 Finance Executive
Gathering a single source of truth for current app: The lack of an intentional UX effort in the Paylater app meant that there was no Sketch file, PSD, or any tangible resource housing those screens. With the aid of some user flows from engineering (Android Studio to the rescue), I took 100’s of screenshots on the live app to form the only concrete resource we could use as discussion points.
Design audit of current app: I observed the flows while simultaneously creating a Material design guideline that discards non-unifying components and introduces new non-existent ones. In determining the styles, we considered factors like legibility and contrast, and how well we can apply it across a variety of use cases. After several rounds of iteration, we arrived at this set of styles:
I experimented different layout styles and shared 2 key explorations:
— one was expressive (huge on colour), the other was calm and quiet (mosty white).
I had several sessions with marketing, product, and engineering to discuss these decisions.
Visual preference testing on Slack yielded about 56% to 44% in favour of calm and
quiet. Engineering also preferred that option because it was considerably less coding
work to shift old designs.
A component-level approach to designing preferred UI direction:
We applied the selected styles across a variety of screens in the app, focusing on creating
re-usable components like text fields, modals e.t.c
In this phase of the project, we leveraged the design guidelines earlier created,
while iterating as needed.
Redesigning empty states with more actionable messages and lively animated
icons
Animation Preview: https://lottiefiles.com/share/Ha95gh
Testing key screens to better decide if redesigns (impact) are worth the cost &
time: Whenever I noticed where UX can be improved, I will create quick sketches
and call for a team discussion. In the case below, it was something customer support says
users are confused about: Hundreds of users calling about their inability to withdraw
from their accounts.
I found this to be a UX issue (discoverability) not a functionality problem, and
after few usability sessions, option B had the most success and was pushed to the visual
design phase.
Led qualitative user testing sessions for further validations: Recruited participants from social media/email newsletter. Created test scripts and questionnaires. Then led both remote and in-house testing sessions to validate core design ideas and unlock insights from our current and look-alike customers.
During the rebrand of Paylater to Carbon, I had to update about 30 micro-interactions to fit
the new style guide. All of these animations were created in GIF format and there were no
source files available to update the colours.
After trying to look for several workarounds, I dedicated a week to rethinking the whole
animations, recreated them in After Effects, redesigned some entirely, and converted them to
JSON via BodyMovin/Lottie.
The result was a migration from static moving images to mathematically calculated vectors
that were rendered natively on the Android engine. The app felt lighter overall, we
saved
about 7 megabytes in app size, animations felt crisper on user devices and we
now have
reusable files that can be easily tweaked for years to come.