Achieve Money
Native Mobile Financial Experience
Status
Production-ready design, validated with users; not publicly launched due to business prioritization.
Role
Staff Product Designer: I owned end-to-end experience design across iOS and Android, including flows, interaction patterns, and contributions to the native design system.
System Overview
Move money system overview
Preview shown: Entry point, decision paths, and the core money movement workflow.
Open full diagram to zoom into edge cases and recovery paths.
- Purpose: Anchor the money movement system
- Why it matters: Standardized a reusable transfer pattern
Overview
Achieve Money was a new native mobile initiative to deliver a streamlined money management experience across onboarding, account visibility, and money movement for a new consumer finance product.
Achieve’s mission is to help people reach their healthiest financial future through a full suite of loan and debt solutions, paired with award-winning customer service agents who work one-on-one with members. The gap was digital. We needed a convenient way for members to service products, build healthier habits, and create the foundation for long-term relationships so we could deliver the right product at the right time.
Destination
Create a trusted, repeatable experience that helps members move money with confidence and recover quickly when something goes wrong.
Role & Scope
Staff Product Designer – Native Apps Lead
I owned end-to-end experience design across iOS and Android, from early discovery through production-ready specs.
Scope of ownership
- Defined the information architecture and core navigation model for the app
- Designed key workflows: onboarding, account visibility, transfers, and money movement
- Established and refined interaction patterns and error/recovery states for high-risk financial flows
- Partnered with engineering to align designs to platform constraints, create and contribute to the native design system
- Collaborated with product and research on testing plans, synthesis, and iteration
Key Partners
Senior Leadership, Product, Engineering, UX Research, Content/Legal (for PII + T&Cs), and Customer Service stakeholders
Deliverables
System overview diagrams, journey/IA maps, flow diagrams, prototypes, usability test plans and findings summaries, and production-ready specs.
What I was accountable for: making complex financial workflows feel simple, trustworthy, and scalable across platforms.
Context & Problem
Achieve Money focused on delivering a simpler way for members to understand and move their money. The experience needed to support onboarding, account visibility, and money movement while operating within strict financial, technical, and compliance constraints.
The challenge was not designing individual screens. It was designing a system of flows that stayed trustworthy under real-world conditions: partial setup, edge cases, error recovery, and moments where members needed human support.
To tackle this, I mapped the end-to-end member journey and focused the team on the highest-risk moments:
- earning trust during setup (OTP, PII, saved state)
- making transfer timing predictable
- designing recovery paths (retry, alternate routes, agent escalation with transcript continuity)
Member Journey
Existing-member journey map for the 1% rate reduction, highlighting
trust moments, dependency failures, and agent support.
View working document
Onboarding Flow
Onboarding flow: new vs returning members.
Designed with saved-state checkpoints and progressive disclosure
to reduce drop-off during OTP and PII.
Themes We Saw
- Members needed clear reasons to trust the experience before sharing sensitive info
- Timing uncertainty increased anxiety during transfers
- When bank linking failed, people wanted an obvious next step, not trial and error
How it shaped the design
- Progressive disclosure and “why we ask” at PII moments, with saved-state checkpoints
- Clear delivery expectations (calendar rules, estimates, status states)
- Recovery designed up front (retry, alternate paths, agent escalation with transcript continuity)
Design Decisions & System Impact
Rather than designing one-off solutions, I approached Achieve Money as a system problem.
I defined a set of core interaction patterns for onboarding, account linking, and money movement that could scale beyond this product. These patterns aligned with the native design system and, in several cases, informed updates to shared components and guidance.
This allowed the team to move faster while maintaining consistency across iOS and Android.
Key decisions included:
- Progressive disclosure + saved-state to reduce cognitive load during onboarding
- Standardized money movement patterns to cover edge cases without fragmenting the experience
- Reusable, abstracted components to support future products and teams
- Agent escalation with transcript continuity to speed recovery when linking or transfers fail
Information Architecture and System Scope
Shows the breadth of flows and states supported by the product.
Validation & Iteration
I partnered closely with research to validate key flows through moderated and unmoderated testing. Findings directly shaped onboarding sequencing, plain-language guidance, and error handling.
The goal was not visual polish. It was confidence, comprehension, and reduced friction.
Move money landing page concepts (tested)
We explored three ways to organize Money Movement entry points so members could quickly find the action they needed and feel confident about what would happen next.
- Most-used list
Quick access based on frequency of use. - Money In / Money Out sections
Clear mental model and reduced mis-taps. - Visual “most used” grouping
Fast scanning with stronger emphasis on primary actions.
What we learned: members prioritized understanding what an action would do over shaving off a step.
We also tested two input models for the transfer flow (consolidated vs step-by-step) to balance speed, comprehension, and recoverability.
Consolidated inputs — Faster entry, more context on one screen
Step-by-step progressive disclosure — Clearer sequencing and better error handling
What we learned: clarity around timing and recovery mattered more than minimizing steps.
Outcome & Reflection
Although Achieve Money was not released publicly, the work reached a production-ready state and helped shape broader platform thinking around native financial flows and system patterns.
This project reinforced the importance of designing products and systems together, especially in complex, regulated domains where speed and quality must coexist.
Project Feedback
“There’s a lot of good conceptualization & prototyping work happening that’s starting to make Money real. The visuals & flows have helped us think through how to position them, be mindful of the friction, test them out & think through what we want the user to do and further refine the flows. I can’t say this enough, special shout out to Kim for her amazing vision and work, it’s been amazing to see our thoughts from the last year & half come to life. Cheers Kim!”
~ Project Manager,
Achieve Money
“Kim is super smart, experienced, savvy, mature, perceptive, and assertive yet approachable. This makes it very easy to work with her. She brings a good sense of humor to potentially stressful situations. She is very structured and systematic in her prototypes / designs. She has built a terrific partnership with [her PM] and he has sung her praises on many occasions… Kim authored and presented a series of brown bags around various design considerations (e.g. mobile, UDAAP examples, etc). It was some of the most thoughtful and insightful material I’ve ever seen, and I told Kim afterwards that across the many dozens of designers I’ve worked with over the years, only maybe 3 people including her possessed the breadth and depth needed to pull together that kind of rich material.”
~ VP of Upper Funnel Product,
Achieve
