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Work

Tidewater

Rebuilding a credit union's mobile app around the three things members actually open it for.

Client
Tidewater Credit Union
Role
Lead product designer
Year
2024
Team
2 designers, 6 engineers, 1 PM
Tidewater app home screen showing a balance and recent payments
Fig. 1Tidewater app home screen showing a balance and recent payments

  • −38%

    Support tickets in the first quarter

  • 4.7

    App Store rating, up from 3.1

  • 2.4×

    Weekly active members

Timeline

14 months, start to launch

  1. Research2 mo
  2. Design6 mo
  3. Build8 mo
  4. Member beta2 mo
  5. Rollout1 mo

The problem

The old app had grown one menu item at a time for nine years. It had 41 entries in its side drawer, and members used four of them.

Session recordings and a week in two branches told the same story: people opened the app to check a balance, pay someone they had paid before, or find out why a card was declined. Everything else could wait a tap.

Approach

We built the home screen around those three jobs and moved the rest into a searchable list. Balance and the last five payments load first, from cache, so the screen is useful before the network answers.

Declined payments got their own state: the reason in plain words, what to do next, and a button that calls the right team with the transaction already attached.

Three phone screens: home, a declined payment, and a repeat payment
Fig. 2Home, a declined card, and paying someone again in two taps.
  1. The balance loads from cache, so the screen is useful before the network answers.
  2. The fix sits where the problem is. Unblocking a card is one button, not a trip to settings.
  3. Paying again remembers the last amount and reference, so the most common payment is two taps.

Details

Amounts animate only when they change while you watch, never on load. Repeat payments remember the last amount and reference. Every destructive action can be undone for five seconds instead of being confirmed in a dialog.

Component sheet with amount, payee row and undo toast
Fig. 3The twelve components the app is built from.
  1. Amounts roll digit by digit when they change while you watch, and never on load.
  2. Five seconds to undo replaced every confirmation dialog in the app.
  3. Three statuses, the same three words on every screen: declined, pending, paid.

Outcome

The new app shipped to all members in March 2024. Card-decline calls dropped by more than a third, and the support team now uses the same decline screen to walk members through a fix.

“Ines found the three things our members actually needed and had the courage to hide the other thirty-eight. Support calls fell in the first month.”
Marta VidalHead of Digital, Tidewater Credit Union

Credits

Product design
Ines Calder, Joana Pires
Research
Rui Almeida
Engineering
Tidewater mobile team
Product
Claire Okafor
App Store

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