When There's No North Star, You Draw Your Own
What I had was a founder who deeply understood the financial infrastructure and a one-page user flow sketched on paper. My first job wasn't to open Figma. It was to become fluent in a domain I had never touched.
I created a sample user persona to clarify the user’s core challenges and identify how the problem can be solved. This is based on initial inputs provided by the founder.
Alongside this, I ran a structured competitor audit — not to copy, but to extract the grammar of fintech UX. I studied how Fi Money, Groww, Slice and Dhanlap handle data-dense screens: how users were onboarded, how they display portfolio values, how they sequence steps in a loan or investment journey. This wasn't benchmarking a similar product. It was learning the visual language of a category so I could apply it to a new one.
role
Sr Product Designer (representing Hexcode)
timeframe
18 months
collaborators
2 designers, Founder, 1 PM and 3 Devs
worked on
Tab & Mobile App (Android) · Web App for Admins
key challenge among many
Every step in the flow required sensitive financial data. Each screen was a potential drop-off point from Aadhaar verification to portfolio pledging. Hence, designing for this means designing the communication, not just the interface. One such challenge was the experience on the home page with a big card showing user's finance data. It was a dynamic state machine disguised as a UI component. At any given moment, the card needed to communicate a completely different story depending on what was true about the user's account:
If the loan was unutilised — show available credit limit and a strong CTA to draw down.
If the loan was partially used — show utilisation percentage with a visual indicator and a CTA to increase credit limit
If the user was approaching their credit limit — show a warning and prompt to pledge more MFs.
If tenure was ending — show urgency, foreclosure option, repayment CTA.
If the pledged MF value had dropped — show impact on credit limit with a clear explanation.
Therefore, it was the product's most important real estate. Each state had different data, different priority hierarchy, and different emotional weight. The card had to hold all of these realities without ever feeling cluttered or confusing.
Along with this the flow had hard dependencies on external APIs — CAMS/KFintech for portfolio data, Aadhaar for identity, NACH for repayment mandate. Hence, communication with detailed copies with minimum visuals was also a challenge.
solution
I designed multiple versions of the card — varying the data hierarchy, the visual treatment of the utilisation indicator, the placement of the foreclosure button, and the typographic weight of critical numbers. Rather than deciding in a vacuum, I conducted an internal A/B test with team members who represented the kind of users we were designing for. We defined a rubric: comprehension speed (could someone identify the most important piece of information within 3 seconds?), action clarity (was the next step obvious?), and trust signal (did the card feel like it was showing you everything honestly?). The selected version optimized for all three. Apart from the card layouts that I proposed -every screen here needed explicit reassurance copy, progress indicators, and clear explanations of what was happening and why.
From Play Store to PhonePe
$1.5M raised in pre seed round • 4.7 rating on playstore
VoltMoney launched on the Play Store and received immediate praise — majorly from investors and fintech community observers. The interface was described as simple, clean, and trustworthy, which was exactly the brief we had never formally written but had always been designing toward.
In mid 2024, the brand had a strategic partnership with PhonePe, the clean interface was ready to merge with the India's leading premier fintech company. Therefore, the UI is benefiting more wider range of audience.
"Just wanted to drop a quick message to express our heartfelt gratitude for your incredible contributions. You have been instrumental in building a great product." VoltMoney team
