Silvia Casagrande
SME Mobile App
/25
The Problem
The bank runs two mobile apps across 8 CEE markets, one for private customers and one for businesses. The business app needed a restyle, but budget ruled out a design system of its own, so it had to reuse the components already built for the private app. This presented the real design challenge: ensuring that the two products appeared distinct to daily users while making the most of the available components.
Constrains & Design Space
Structure, components and interactions were locked. That left exactly three variables: color, imagery, and the product taxonomy, the one place where the business app could genuinely diverge from the private one. Framing the brief this way turned an open-ended restyle into three testable decisions.
Execution & Key Decisions
Before proceeding with the actual redesign, we worked on the UI. We decided to test different color and image options and ask users which of these best matched their idea of a “business app”.
Colour on Identical Components: Tested on the home screen, same components, different combinations of background and cards.
Imagery in Three Treatments: Photography (warm, but unifying across the two products), flat icons per item (functional, compact), or no visual elements at all (dense, fast to scan).
We therefore conducted an unmoderated “open card sort” activity to observe how business customers group the banking products offered in the app.
The resulting IA, was composed by 10 first-level categories, 22 subcategories, 10 third-level items. Nine cards went unsorted, several grouped by participants themselves under "unfamiliar terms", which turned a naming problem into a labelling decision: descriptive labels in place of product names nobody recognised.
Impact
Shipped in all 8 markets where this version of the group's app runs.
Differentiation at zero system cost: the darker palette and per-item icons read as corporate to participants and separated the two apps without a second design system. The direction was carried through to the App Store imagery.
Full process notes & deep-dive wireframes available on Notion