App Redesign Reset
Overview
At Varo Bank, I initiated and led a team building and design reset. This effort brought two siloed teams together to produce a scalable design language that was grounded in best UX practices, and a natural evolution of the current Varo brand. This initiative resulted in a more cohesive design organization built on trust, sharing, and collaboration.
Role
UX
UI
Team Building
Workshopping
Prototyping
Objective
Reduce design organization team silos and produce a shared design language output.
Marketing team redesign
A few months into my time there, the head of product design pulled me into a meeting to share news about a rebranding effort Varo's marketing team was spearheading. A large part of the rebrand effort was to update the app and feel beyond the standard Google Material solutions Varo currently used for components, typography, and interactions to better reflect emerging design trends and the lives of our diverse customer base. At this point, designs had preliminary approval and the marketing team had engineering slated to start building in two weeks.
Although the rebrand was a surprise, it was exciting that the bank had an appetite to rethink and restyle our end-to-end experiences. The head of design and I evaluated the proposal through a product design lens. While the designs served as an inspirational vision state for what Varo digital experiences could be, we identified several areas for improvement across interaction, scalability, and accessibility.
After a thorough review of the marketing team's redesign, I observed a variety of design direction choices that would result in scalability, accessibility, UX best practices, and engineering challenges.
Driving co-creation
In order to re-establish a cohesive team structure and communication between the marketing and product design teams, I reached out to marketing leadership. I wanted to know how they were doing, better understand what they were tasked with, what was working, what wasn't working, and how our product design team could pivot this project in a way that could bring the teams together.
Accelerated exloration
Condensed timeline
Because designs had to be handed to engineering by the end of the current sprint, our team needed to explore, refine, produce, and deliver final designs in less than two weeks.
Design jam sessions
I led jam sessions with a select group of product designers. Working closely together, we rapidly explored designs designs that were on-brand, accessible, and scalable.
I recommended our team to focus on three distinct experiences — sign in, home screen, and account activity. They would serve as key touch points in a customer journey — what they see at the 'front door', what they see on their core home screen, and what they see when reviewing transactional details.
Exploration
My explorations
Team explorations
Illustration art direction
In addition to my involvement with the product design team explorations, I assisted leading the art direction of the illustrative style that would compliment our redesign effort.
