Redesign of the App's Home Page
Role
Senior Product Designer
Duration
6 months
Company
Anorbank
Challenge
The bank was repositioning its app — 4M+ registered users at the time — from a utility payments tool into a daily-use digital bank, and the home page was the main battleground for that shift. The context matters: in Uzbekistan people keep several payment apps at once, switching whenever one is unstable or has a single convenient feature. Retention lives or dies on whether your app becomes the place where a person's main financial activity accumulates. The existing main screen was built around one job: pay and leave. My task was to redesign it so that everyday financial tasks lived one tap away — without breaking the habits of users who just wanted to pay quickly. The home page was the first of the app's five main sections slated for redesign over six months.
Process
1. Research
- Analyzed 12 local payment and banking apps, noting where each interface worked and where it broke down.
- Ran user research with current users before touching the layout.
2. Design and Iteration: the card block story
- The card block got the most iteration: color, position, covers, and animation were all tested. The first version looked great in isolation — and failed in testing: the cards were so contrast-heavy they pulled attention away from everything else on the screen.
- We tested lighter card designs and found they stayed just as recognizable while making the rest of the page easier to notice — scenario completion in usability tests improved measurably after the change.
- Behavioral data showed two competing entry paths into payments and transfers: many users started by picking a card, many others went through quick actions. Instead of forcing one pattern, we supported both — cards as a thumb-reach carousel, with the customizable quick-actions panel directly below in the most comfortable thumb position.
- The freed-up color contrast moved to the story circles — the new driver for onboarding, retention, and cross-sell of bank products.
3. User Testing and Feedback
- Collaborated with the bank's customer service office to test prototypes with actual customers — not coworkers pretending to be users.
- Ran three full rounds of moderated testing, observing interactions and collecting qualitative data on each iteration.
- Each round fed directly into the next design revision before development started.
4. Final layout
- Made a central search tool the primary navigation method.
- Moved card information closer to the balance display, so card management stayed in the main view.
- Reserved priority zones for system messages and for the product status, cashback, and installment blocks.
- Added a banner for new products and promotions on larger phones.
Conclusion
After release, average session duration grew from 2.5 to 3.2 minutes — tracked by the bank's product analytics team, for whom it was the primary retention metric. For this product that number means exactly what the strategy needed: the app became worth staying in — checking products, cashback, stories, and offers instead of paying and leaving. Time-to-complete stayed the guardrail for transactional flows; engagement was the goal only where engagement was the point. Three rounds of testing with real bank customers meant the final design shipped with few surprises, and the new home page became the foundation the team reused for the next sections of the app.