Rebuilding trust in a wealth platform

A strategy sprint and design-system programme that turned a sprawling investment dashboard into a calm, legible product clients actually open.

At a glance

41%
More weekly active clients: 90 days after launch; −58%
Support tickets about balances: 3.2×
Faster feature delivery: Median cycle time; 4.7
App-store rating: Up from 3.1

Northfield’s clients trusted the firm with their savings, but they didn’t trust the app. Balances were buried under twelve competing widgets, terminology changed from screen to screen, and every new feature arrived with its own visual dialect. Engagement was falling, and the support team spent a third of its week explaining numbers that the interface should have explained itself.

The brief

Leadership asked for “a redesign”. After two weeks of interviews it was clear the real problem was upstream: nobody had agreed what the product was for. Before drawing anything, we needed a shared answer.

What we heard

Clients wanted three things: to know what they had, whether it was on track, and what — if anything — to do next.

What we had

Forty-one dashboard modules, five button styles, two definitions of “balance” and no owner for the overall experience.

Before & after

The overview went from a wall of equal-weight charts to a single, ranked story: the number that matters, its trend, then the detail.

Redesigned overview with one headline balance, one trend line and an allocation list — Drag to compare. The redesign removes 70% of on-screen elements while surfacing more of what clients asked for.

Original dashboard with twelve competing chart widgets — Drag to compare. The redesign removes 70% of on-screen elements while surfacing more of what clients asked for.

Choosing the approach

We weighed three routes with the leadership team. Extending the existing front end won: it kept the data layer the engineers trusted and let us ship in slices.

Criterion	Rebuild	ExtendChosen	Buy
Time to first release	9 months	6 weeks	3 months
Keeps existing data layer	—	●	—
Ships in slices	—	●	●
Owns the experience	●	●	—
Estimated cost	£££	£	££

Decision matrix presented at the week-three steering review.

A system, not a skin

The design system was the real deliverable. Tokens for colour, type, spacing and motion; 34 components; and — most importantly — a contribution model so the in-house team could extend it without me.

01DiscoveryInterviews, analytics, audit
02StrategyThree questions, roadmap
03FoundationsTokens, type, grid
04Components34 components, docs
05RolloutOverview, holdings, transfers

BetaLaunch

Illustrative data. Weekly active clients, in thousands.Source: Product analytics

Outcomes

41%

More clients checking in every weekMeasured 90 days after launch against the same period a year earlier.Source: Product analytics (illustrative)

Our product finally looks like the company we’re trying to be.

Priya RamanChief Product Officer, Northfield Capital

Notes & sources

01Client interviews, n=18 — Weeks 1–2
02Support ticket analysis — 6 months of tickets, categorised
03WCAG 2.2

Sample case study. Client name, figures and details are illustrative and included to demonstrate the template.