Pulse Finance
A spending companion that turns raw bank transactions into calm, glanceable budgets. Designed end-to-end in nine weeks, from first stakeholder sketch to a shipped TestFlight build.
01 — Overview
Money without the anxiety graph
Pulse came to us with a working transaction API and a beta that read like a spreadsheet. Nobody opens a spreadsheet for fun, so our brief was simple: make people want to check their money every morning.
We reframed the home screen around one question — “am I okay this month?” — answered in a single glanceable dial, with the detail one tap below.
02 — Approach
What the engagement covered
- Twelve customer interviews that killed the category-pie-chart home screen.
- A glance-first information architecture: dial, then timeline, then detail.
- Motion design for every money state — deposits land, bills loom, goals fill.
- A 60-component mobile kit with dark-mode tokens from day one.
- Pairing with their engineers through TestFlight, fixing layout bugs in the same Figma file.
03 — Outcome
Shipped, rated, retained
The redesigned app launched to a 4.8-star TestFlight rating and doubled week-four retention against the old beta. Support tickets about “confusing balances” fell to nearly zero within a month.
Pulse kept the component kit and now ships new features without touching the core screens — exactly what a good system should allow.
04 — Related work
Keep exploring
Beacon Health Portal — another high-trust interface, this time for patients.
Loom Design System — the token architecture approach, scaled to four products.
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Building something people check daily?
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