One flow on probation. Fourteen journeys later., Dhruv Maithani

Entry 01The problem

The app worked. That was the most generous thing you could say about it.

Built by another firm before us, it did what a banking app legally needs to do. But navigation was awkward, information went missing right when you needed it, and none of the flows matched the muscle memory people had already built on Google Pay and Paytm. The reviews complained about broken links. The real problem was quieter than that: nothing about the app made you feel in control of your own money.

The bank knew it too. They didn't arrive with a metrics deck or a problem statement, they arrived with a hunch that their app wasn't good enough, and a test to see whether we could do better.

Source account screen — 01Source account

Entry 02The audition, Add Money

They didn't hand us fourteen flows. They handed us one, and watched.

The test was the add-money flow: a high-frequency journey customers touched every day. Get it right, and the door opens. Get it wrong, and the engagement ends politely.

I started from what already works. I'd used Google Pay and Paytm for years, same as every customer this bank was losing attention to. So instead of inventing a new interaction model, I borrowed the mental models people already trusted and rebuilt the flow on top of them. Familiarity isn't lazy in financial UX. It's the point. People moving money are anxious enough without having to learn your clever new pattern.

The client had asks of their own: preset amounts instead of manual entry, a few interaction tweaks, and one I disagreed with. They wanted their savings interest rate promoted hard, right inside the transfer flow.

Line held

You don't run ads in the middle of someone's money transfer.

I couldn't kill the promotion, that battle wasn't winnable. But I talked them down from making it the loudest thing on the screen. We shipped it present but restrained. A small win, and the first time the client took my reasoning over their instinct.

Select account screen — 01Select account

We delivered. The single test flow became fourteen journeys, onboarding, payments, savings, credit cards, mutual funds, spend tracking, picked by the client on usage and business priority, with our team of five owning the design end to end.

Entry 03The front door

The best flow in the app is worthless if people can't get through the front door.

The old login was a single screen, registered mobile number or username, then proceed. One door, one key. Fine until the key didn't fit: a forgotten username, a new phone, a freshly swapped SIM, and you were locked out of your own money on the doorstep.

So we stopped treating login as a screen and rebuilt it as a flow. The registered mobile number gets you to the door; identity gets proven four ways, by Customer ID, PAN, account number, or debit card, because people show up holding different things, and the right front door is the one that opens with whatever they already have.

The heavy lifting moved out of sight. SIM verification and binding ran in the background, dual-SIM aware, quietly proving the phone was really theirs. The screens people actually saw stayed about identity, not plumbing.

And it finished where the old one stopped short, an MPIN set once, and an optional biometric. Get in the long way today; tomorrow it's a thumb. The most-used flow in any bank app isn't a payment. It's the login before it.

First impression

Onboarding is the only screen guaranteed to be seen by everyone, and the easiest place to lose them.

Spend your best thinking on the doorway, not just the rooms behind it.

The original IDFC FIRST login screen — The original login. One screen, two fields, and no plan for the day the credentials didn't line up.

Entry 04Ten versions of the same button

Nobody planned a design system. We earned one the hard way.

Five designers, fourteen parallel flows, and the slow realisation that we'd built ten slightly different versions of the same button. Reviews kept stalling on questions we'd already answered. New designers kept reinventing components that already existed. So we stopped and systematised: locked the component library, wrote down the patterns, defined the language.

The expected payoff happened, faster builds, faster reviews. The unexpected one mattered more. This client had an endless appetite for "something different." The system became our guardrail: a principled way to say no to novelty for its own sake, and a faster way to say yes when different was genuinely justified. It managed the relationship as much as it managed the files.

Component library, the design system — Component library and style guide, the foundation every later flow was assembled from.

The redesigned IDFC FIRST app, onboarding through dashboard — One flow on probation became a system. The onboarding rebuild sits inside a far larger redesign of the app.

Entry 05What came of it

I won't invent a conversion chart.

We designed, validated with the client and BCG, and handed off, the post-launch numbers never came back to us. That's consulting. What I can show is the thing that's harder to fake: the engagement kept growing.

ScopeOne probation flow became fourteen core journeys, then NRI onboarding, concept explorations, and proof-of-concept work BCG used to win buy-in from the bank's leadership.
TrustEarly on, every screen drew pushback. By the end, the client heard our reasoning out even when it cut against their instinct.
SignalFeedback arrived informally, debrief calls, messages when something landed well with their seniors, but it was consistent: the new flows were working.

For work that started as an audition, the expansion was the metric.

Entry 06What I took away

Two things stayed with me.

Influence is earned slowly and spent carefully. I came into this engagement thinking my job was executing briefs well. I left understanding that the more valuable skill is earning the right to shape the brief, through delivery, through picking battles, and occasionally through letting a bad idea fail at its own pace.

A design system isn't housekeeping. Built at the right moment, it's leverage, for the team's speed, and for the client's appetite. That reframing, from deliverable to strategic tool, is something I now look for in every project.