Nimbus — making everyday banking feel calm again
A ground-up redesign of a banking app's core flows, focused on reducing money-anxiety rather than just modernising the surface.
Overview
Where the brief started — and where it actually went
Nimbus asked for a visual refresh. Three weeks into research it became clear the real issue wasn't the visuals — people felt anxious every time they opened the app, because the interface buried the information that mattered most: low-balance warnings, pending transactions and upcoming bills, all sitting under a wall of generic dashboard widgets. We reframed the brief around reducing that anxiety, not just polishing the surface.
Problem
Support data and usability sessions pointed to the same three issues
Information overload — the home screen showed fourteen widgets before a user's actual balance.
Hidden urgency — pending charges and low-balance alerts sat one tap deep instead of being visible up front.
Generic categories — spending labels didn't match how people actually talked about their own money.
Process
Four stages, five rounds of testing
Listen before sketching
Interviewed 14 customers across three account types, plus a full teardown of six competitor apps.
Set design principles
Mapped findings to three rules: surface urgency first, explain every number, never make people guess.
Compete, then converge
Built two competing home-screen concepts in parallel before converging on a single direction.
Refine in public
Ran five rounds of moderated usability testing, adjusting the flow after every single round.
Solution
Three changes did most of the work
A home screen that leads with what matters
Balance, pending items and upcoming bills now sit above the fold, in that order — every other widget moved to a secondary tab instead of competing for attention.
Spending categories people recognise
We replaced the bank's internal merchant codes with categories drawn straight from interview transcripts — "Groceries," "Going out," "Bills," instead of "Retail — Tier 2."
Confirmation screens that explain themselves
Every transfer or payment now states, in plain language, what changes and when — cutting the back-and-forth that used to land in the support queue.
Result