01
A fragmented product experience
Customers experienced Raisin differently depending on where they landed: a legacy web dashboard, a mobile app that didn't mirror it, and emails that looked like a different brand entirely.
Brand evolution
Rebrand, rebuild, and a design practice that could keep up.
Two tracks run in parallel — Practice on the product, Enablement for the team. Measured honestly, not just shipped.
The why
Raisin was evolving its brand across product, mobile, and email — without an operating model to make that evolution stick.
Impact: NPS, task success, adoption, AuM, and retention all moved on the customer side — alongside research rituals, playbooks, AI workflows, and coaching the org adopted. Measured honestly in Proof; not everything lifted.
02
A brand handed over, not built out
Brand agency Koto delivered a static identity. After handoff, Raisin's design team had to apply the new visual identity and evolve the entire product experience into a new cohesive brand.
03
A design practice without shared conventions
User studies were rare, static designs were default to showcase and design critiques weren't happening. Every handoff paid a tax for it.
The journey
Two programmes, run in parallel — not one tidy sequence.
My remit: brand evolution into live product, and enablement so the team could sustain it. Practice = customer outcomes. Enablement = team capability. I where I owned it; we at tribe scale.
Practice
Research-led decisions, shipped screens, measured outcomes.
Enablement
Rituals, research OS, docs, tooling, coaching — I built; the org adopted.
A home for their wealth
I joined mid-rebrand as customers still read Weltsparen in the dashboard. I led two rounds of hierarchy research, the product colour map, and the email system; we shipped Wealth Hub across 12 markets — and I established the team's first evidence rituals.
I led brand → product. We delivered Wealth Hub × 12 markets.
Agency rebrand · Koto
Absorbing an agency rebrand, then scaling it.
I joined as the product was still known as Weltsparen in customers' minds, and the first brief wasn't a dashboard — it was absorbing agency Koto's static identity and working out what it would take to carry it into a live, multi-market product.
Wealth Hub
Customer problem
Savers landed on a dashboard that still felt like a product catalogue — too much Raisin, too little of their money. They couldn’t orient to what they held, or manage it as their wealth, across savings, investments, and retirement.
The bet
Trade-off
Position: Flat = product catalogue; hierarchy = home for wealth. I took this before the data.
Settled: A vs B · 38 participants · 5 markets · 80%+ couldn’t orient in the flat model
Outcome: Hierarchy shipped across 12 markets
Savings, Investments, Retirement — one structured hierarchy
A vs B research · hierarchy concepts
Two concept directions tested with customers: flat product list vs asset-class hierarchy. Signals that shaped the organizing principles:
“Too much Raisin, too little me — I expect to see my product upfront.”
“Treemap is difficult to understand for me, not intuitive — a doughnut or a bar chart would be more understandable for me.”
“Would like to see positive news like ‘Since the last login you earned xxx €…’ or ‘10k are available again — you can invest now.’”
“Country rating is important to me; Raisin should ask me about my preference.”
38 participants · 2 rounds · 🇩🇪 🇳🇱 🇬🇧 🇪🇸 🇫🇷
HNW
High Net Worth Core
Wants evidence Raisin can optimize liquidity without manual effort.
~€9.5M wealth · ~€1.9M Raisin wallet · 30% share of attention
Affluent
Affluent Core
Maintains wealth simply — retirement comfort, travel, supporting family.
~€1.6M wealth · ~€368K Raisin wallet · 60% share of attention
Affluent Young
Affluent Young
Builds financial peace of mind toward early retirement without cutting living standards.
~€900K wealth · ~€270K Raisin wallet · 10% share of attention
MVP launch impact
Pre-launch chose hierarchy. Post-launch, that bet held at scale — Wealth Hub read as a home for wealth, not a catalogue.
Hierarchy bet confirmed
Majority report they can better understand and manage their wealth — the IA, not just the reskin
+23 → +53
Dashboard / design NPS across DE, NL, ES, and PL
What customers praised wasn’t polish — it was the structure:
“Everything works great. I especially like the drill-down graphics — Overview → Fixed deposit → individual bank. That’s how every website should work.”
“At first glance it’s excellent: everything you need is right there, and it’s very intuitive.”
72–87% agree they can better understand and manage their wealth · DE / NL / ES / PL
Wealth Hub · systems
A colour map for light, dark, and twelve markets.
I led token rules for light, dark, and 12 markets — Savings blue · Investments amber · Retirement green, with savings-only remaps. Documented in Confluence as the single source for eng, markets, and design.
12 markets · 3 market-type rules · light + dark token specs
All products
SavingsInvestmentRetirement
Savings + investment
BlueYellow
Savings-only
Fix termOvernightNotice
Email as a product
From one-off reskins to a governed email system.
I mapped transactional vs marketing patterns, then built an atomic system by use case — and bridged what Bloomreach could actually render (incl. Weblayer).
Master-template concept · spans every marketing & transactional use case
Rejected: one more one-off template instead of a system.
Better process, better product
The team needed shared conventions before more dashboard work could compound. I set Figma Ways of Working across ~12 designers, then owned the post-MVP sequence — filters, zero-state A/B, Wrapped — with a measurement framework so we knew what each release moved.
I led Ways of Working + measurement. I owned post-MVP discovery. We shipped with eng.
Enablement
Upgraded to Figma. File organisation hadn't caught up.
I ran a retro, then shipped one duplicable file. Coached Ways of Working across ~12 designers — files organised so stakeholders can follow design without asking. Still how every project starts.
Team standard · ~12 designers · Q4 2024 retro
Web dashboard · post-MVP
MVP shipped the hierarchy. Customers still had different questions.
Customer problem
The Wealth Hub spine oriented people — but they still couldn’t answer everyday questions: what’s at each bank, what’s by country, what matures next, and what happened this year.
The strategy
I owned the post-MVP sequence — lenses first, then zero-state, then Wrapped — and measured each release against a shared UX framework. We shipped each with engineering.
Impact
3 measured releases · filtering led adoption · zero-state: no conversion lift · Wrapped: engagement + soft AuM
MVP launch survey · top customer signals
Country-level overview
“Show utilization per country so customers can monitor deposit-insurance limits.” Germany
Summary by bank
“A summary of totals showing how much I have invested per bank.” Germany
Sorting & maturity
“The dashboard should show the next maturing deposit first, not in random order.” Netherlands
Year in review
“A calendar view showing when the next interest payments are due.” Germany
Shipped in sequence:
Filtering
Lenses for category, deposits, and country — with availability.
Impact: All-deposits view led adoption.
Zero-state
Blank first login → A/B donut carousel vs empty (ES & NL).
Impact: No conversion lift — visual hypothesis without enough upstream qual. Tightened how we form conversion A/Bs after. Shipped for clearer empty-state UX.
Raisin Wrapped
Year-in-review about their saving — not the brand talking about itself. Design-initiated — no PM brief.
Impact: Strong reach/completion · soft AuM (not significant). Next: bridge reflection → action (renew / add funds).
Rejected: shipping each release as a one-off, without a shared view of what customers still needed.
Enablement
A shared bar for prototyping — then AI raised the ceiling.
Shared fidelity language (Principles of Prototyping). I co-led Figma Make × AI with Product; coached a senior designer foundations → autonomy.
12-slide workshop · Figma Make × AI · ongoing 1:1 coaching
Research · operating model
Wealth Hub proved the value. The team still needed a way to run the next study.
User studies had been rare and German-only. Wealth Hub changed that — multi-market interviews, synthesis, stakeholder alignment. The MVP launch survey showed structured feedback at scale. I authored the research operating model: when to use interviews vs surveys, how participants are recruited through Bloomreach, hypothesis-first briefs, synthesis in Miro, and the compliance layer so legal and markets could sign off once, not per study.
6-step workflow · Bloomreach recruitment · Confluence playbook
Brief
Hypotheses
Recruit
Interview
Incentivise
Synthesize
Mobile and the horizon
The tribe split in two, the mobile redesign had stalled for months, and nobody had written down where the product was going. I took mobile end-to-end — desk research, Maze validation, Cura vision — and raised the team's prototyping bar.
I led mobile IA + vision. I initiated earnings with Deposits. Maze = pre-launch.
Desk research
Read the stall before redesigning.
Interaction data challenged the default “copy web” plan: 42% portfolio-card, 25% donut, 33% tabs — enough to stop blind replication before ideation started.
Web ↔ mobile parity
Re-ground, don't restart.
Took over a stalled programme and pushed mobile-first ideation on what already existed — re-ground the Wealth Hub spine for mobile, don’t clone the layout or throw the system away.
IA + concept
Four tabs, one visual idea.
Designed Overview, Portfolio, Wallet, and Products as a scannable mobile home — allocation rings, light and dark on the Wealth Hub colour map — ready to validate, not defend.
Trade-off
Position: Thin analytics tab as MVP erodes trust — embed where decisions happen.
Settled: Maze · portfolio-card 92.9% vs tabbed 71.4%
Outcome: Embedded pattern shipping · open risk: pending products 42.9% / 57.1%
Maze validation
Pressure-test, don't defend.
Pressure-tested two IAs in a three-week Maze study. Portfolio-card hit 92.9% task success vs 71.4% on the tabbed alternative — enough to ship. Mobile is launching now; this is pre-launch validation, not live impact. Open risk: locating pending products still split 42.9% / 57.1%.
Lifetime earnings
Making “I'm winning” visible.
Customers still couldn’t see cumulative earnings in one place. I initiated a dashboard earnings widget with the Deposits domain — one cumulative number first, breakdown second. Multilingual verbatims confirmed the framing.
Design vision · VP mandate · I authored the narrative
Design vision for where Raisin must evolve.
VP initiated the vision exercise. I owned the work inside it — Gather, Envision, Plan — and authored the 8-slide Cura deck: from reporting the past to helping savers decide next.
Gather → Envision → Plan · 8-slide narrative authored solo
Design × AI
What started as a prototyping workshop became design's 180-day operating plan. As one of four org-wide AI Champions, I built four tools for daily production use, championed the operating plan, and led Showcase and Clinic until the workflows stuck.
I built the toolkit. We ran the programme; I championed design's slice.
Origin
Figma Make × AI raised the ceiling. We needed realistic figures to step into the user's shoes.
Placeholder figures break fintech demos. I built a live prototype (search + One Data personas); published org-wide.
Live prototype → Confluence → 180-day operating plan
Programme
A 180-day programme to match engineering velocity.
VP launched 180-day AI enablement. I wrote design's operating plan — Lab kick-start, then Showcase + Clinic I led.
Kick-start Lab → Showcase + Clinic · 180 days
Design × Cursor toolkit
The programme was mostly coaching — the toolkit supported it.
Setup
Install Cursor, connect Figma MCP, and Git basics to get a repo running.
Rules
Shared .cursorrules — tokens, typography, accessibility, and One Data on every prompt.
Skills
Repeatable pipelines — design QA, annotate, and variant workflows.
Subagents
Specialist modes — component architect, design systems, state and theme sync.
Commands
One-shot shortcuts — clean, polish, build, sync, responsive, a11y.
Workflow
Iterate until clean — draft → polish → micro-fix → responsive → motion.
Project Registry · Examples · Confluence
Lab · 4-week sprint
Four tools the team uses every day.
A structured build sprint — Design QA, copywriting, typography, and prototype annotation — all in production use.
Cadence
-
Coaching
Not just tooling.
Three designers coached on AI workflows — foundations first, then autonomy on live work. Still running regularly.
-
Showcase
Demo sessions
Weekly sessions I led — what we'd built, what was working, and how to adopt it on live work.
-
Clinic
Office hours
Open troubleshooting for Cursor setup, prompts, and workflow questions.
Proof
What it produced — measured honestly, market by market.
Some numbers moved (NPS, task success, loyalty). Some didn't: zero-state — no conversion lift; Wrapped — soft AuM, not significant. I measured both.
Practice
Customer outcomes.
Enablement
Team capability.
The brand, built out
From static guidelines to a living system
— across every touchpoint customers actually use.