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I love to nurture growth, in myself and others. This project was done earlier in my career, and I’ve chosen to leave it here to illustrate career advancement and expansion of project depth/scope over time.
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Azlo is a digital banking app for entrepreneurs and freelancers, as both a web and native mobile app. An early stage neobank, the company was still finding its way towards a healthy product and process.
I worked as a Product Designer, co-leading this project with another Product Designer and with two Front-end Web Developers, a Product Manager, and a team of Mobile Developers.
Azlo’s product had a serious information hierarchy problem. The company was stuck in a loop of injecting micro features into its product without considering the macro experience, and the app no longer scaled.
We needed to reimagine a navigation system and define key interaction patterns that the app could mature into.
The company also had a serious code health problem that made the environment difficult for Developers to work within. We knew that we were on the brink of needing a major code refactor, and we needed to lay the groundwork for it while also advancing our design system.
We practiced a lean design process, where we worked closely and constantly with Developers and a Product Manager to get feedback. We needed to have a full picture of the technical constraints in order to iterate on our designs and reach a solution that was possible in the now, and would set us up for later success.
The approach we took could be broken into three phases: Research, Design, and Iteration.
We talked with stakeholders and experts in Customer Support and Finance to capture usability problems from their domain area and what they were hearing from users.We closely monitored user feedback channels like mobile store reviews and Customer Support tickets to better understand problem trends and how they were interconnected.
We knew that there were much larger, structural UX problems at play that we wouldn’t be able to tackle in this first phase, but we documented everything so that we could come back and solve for them in future design sprints.
We conducted a product analysis to better understand how other neo-banks approached navigation, hierarchy, and product strategy and positioning. We could learn from the successes and findings of others, and then push the boundaries within the context of our users’ experience.