Our concept for the app itself was to strip the design to its most simple and fundamental. Our team, lead by Emily Coates (VP & Managing Director of Design), and alongside Product Designers Alexis Romanoff and Jonathan O’Brien and User Experience Designers Ashley Vernon and Arthur Dickerson, established five principles to always consider when iterating that defined our point of view — Empathy, Transparency, Simplicity, Familiarity, and Flexibility. Instead of a more traditional (and time consuming) period of wire-framing and research, we designed high fidelity screens in tandem with UX explorations, allowing us to iterate much more quickly and make real-time decisions using specific user feedback.
Art Direction
Design
Product Design
BrightWay is the first credit card offering from OneMain Financial. With only an identity and credit card design in place, I was brought in to create and oversee an extensive design system that would reach all aspects of the brand — the product, the web, and in marketing. The first step was to provide a more traditional brand guidelines document that we could all use as a foundation for moving forward; encompassing color, typography, illustration and photography directions, iconography rules, and much more.
We were tasked with launching an MVP product in only six months, including development time. Using those core principles as a guide, we could quickly decide what functionality would be most integral to the users experience, and what foundations we could put in place to allow the product to grow in the future.
For onboarding, we created a chat-like guide that would help collect a potentially large amount of information in an enjoyable and easy to digest experience.
A specific system of when to use full-screen modals was developed, with large buttons and prominent calls to action always present. More standard sections of the product, such as Transactions and Payments, utilized simple cards that could be tapped to expand into a much more detailed view.
Once the MVP launched, I got to work on creating an extensive component library in Figma that informed all aspects of the design of the product and future web applications. We had the building blocks in place, and this library needed to A) allow designers to quickly update and edit existing flows based on actual user data, and B) extend the entire experience into a responsive website. Again, the design system and component library allowed us to make decisions and produce these flows easily.
We were really conscious of how the initial MVP product could scale into a responsive experience. Fullscreen modals could become drawers that appeared over the main sections of the website. The onboarding chat experience could be replicated into a really useful helper throughout the site when needed.
Finally, an aspect of the system that I really appreciated was a strict decision to keep the product and web experience as fundamental as possible, while concurrently push the brand into new and unexpected places within our marketing. These two segments still play off of each other and live within the overall brand family, but in a way that streamlines their true function.
