Product Design Lead
2024
3 Months
Agile Scrum
Flutter
Overview
Vemi is a fresh new bank from the UK offering ethical, Sharia compliant savings and homebuying products to their customers - allowing values and finance to go hand in hand.


Following on from a gorgeously executed branding project, I was brought in by digital product heavy hitters Neverbland, to help Vemi run the cross-functional product squad tasked with designing and building a pragmatic, but still pretty ambitious MVP of their go to market mobile app.


Equal parts high craft, high stakeholder engagement - our design sprints felt like a full contact sport, with lots of input from members of the Vemi team, who could speak to risk, regulatory, operational and financial product requirements in order to help us level up our product development.
Multidisciplinary design chops
Crunchy UX complexity
Informed by research
Stakeholder management
Cross-functional team building
Storytelling and advocacy
Strategic oversight
Defining process and ways of working
Connecting to business strategy
Mobile App design
Core experience of MVP mobile app
Account page - light & dark mode
Undoubtedly my main focus during the project was delivering the final app screens for the MVP app.
The brand developed by Neverbland was bold, vibrant and ambitious. It was a lot of fun to work with.
One of our key focusses throughout the experience was considering where and when to let the brand in, and when to keep the product and experience clean, sleek and paired back.
Crunchy UX problem solving
Exception handling states for verification of payee
One of the most satisfying aspects of this project was uncovering the complexity behind what seemed like straightforward savings account products.
Regulatory considerations are extensive and must be clearly communicated to customers. Anti-money laundering and fraud concerns add to this complexity. Moreover, the mechanics of a savings account are more intricate than they appear, highlighting the importance of effective exception handling.
Fortunately, Vemi prides itself on making things clear and transparent for customers, which greatly aided our UX decisions.
The outcome was some of the clearest and most thoughtful UX flows I’ve had the privilege of creating.
Flow to allow transferring of funds while verifying payee
Packaging and annotation write-up for engineers
Design system
Semantic token updates - notes to design system team
Vemi knew from the jump that building a product with meticulously considered tokenisation would allow them to scale much faster later on, when they need to consider larger scale design decisions for their audience (such as right to left page layouts).
As such, the decision was made to invest time and effort in building a comprehensive enough design system, that would provide the flexibility when it was needed.
This meant that every sprint had a proper chunk of time dedicated to building and updating tokens and components - which was an absolute dream! It was so nice to dedicate time to do this kind of stuff properly, so early on.
Overview of my design system updates for a given sprint
Cross-functional squad vibes
Presenting our squad's work at an all hands show & tell
Squad retros were always supportive and authentic
One of the things made made this project such a joy, day in, day out - was the camaraderie and vibe in our squad.
This was a small unit of people, pulling together and supporting one another, sprint after sprint.
It felt as though we built an infectious working culture that the rest of the company fed back on in our all hands show and tells.
UI dedications to squad members in show and tell slides
