CRED is one of the largest payment apps in India. Over the past few years, I’ve worked on almost all their product lines, mainly focusing on payments, lending, and credit systems used by 17M+ users.
Most of the time, the things we designed received equal amounts of praise and criticism because of our bold choices and opinions on taste, most of which were driven by a recurring observation — most financial products work, but very few of them feel intentional.
So with that intent, we ventured every day to design things that made good financial behaviour rewarding.
Choreographing complexity
Usually, financial products are riddled with details and heavy decision-making. So we worked around a core tenet to make the users “take one decision at a time”. Let me explain that with a few examples.
While onboarding onto any product where users needed to enter a lot of details, we broke the journey down into smaller, focused steps. This helped them focus on what was in front of them instead of feeling overwhelmed.
CRED card - onboarding sequence
In CRED Cash+, a lending product, choosing a loan amount involved multiple decisions — selecting the amount, choosing the tenure, and doing some mental math on the repayment. In this case, showing everything at once increases cognitive fatigue.
So we created interactions where the information splits into pieces. First, you choose the amount. Then the interface reveals the associated details beneath it. One decision, then the next.
CRED Cash - money withdrawal selection
We used this style of sequencing everywhere to tone down complexity.
In CRED Cash+, we also calculated users’ credit limits based on investment assets that could be leveraged. Simply showing “Here’s your limit” left them with too many questions. So we built up a sequence where we first fetched all their funds, then morphed and added them up to reveal their total limit.
CRED Cash+ - credit limit calculation
This not only made things easy to comprehend but also helped in building trust and transparency on how things were working.
Explaining with motion
This is something I’m super passionate about. Using motion to me always felt like the most elegant way to tell a story better.
In CRED Cash+, we anchored the experience around a locker metaphor — users’ investments are secured and stored inside, and the credit balance comes out of that as a result. We created an interaction to show investments being stored in the locker and money flowing out.
CRED Cash+ (from left) - Locker visual, Money withdrawal
We leveraged the same principle for other instances as well, like payment processing. When users made a credit card payment, we created a sequence where they could see the whole thing play out and understand exactly what had happened, without us having to explain anything.
Making a payment with credit card
We also used motion to show what a new product was capable of. For CRED Money, which enables users to track their expenses and balances across multiple bank accounts, we created an onboarding sequence that explained how everything worked and came together.
CRED money onboarding
Compounding effect of care
In everything we designed, we always strived to go the extra mile to add small touches that made you smile.
When a user received their CRED Card, their name was engraved onto the card, letter by letter.
user's name getting engraved onto the CRED Card
This also carried into some of these ideas that never made the cut, but I had a lot of fun crafting them nonetheless.
(form left) Home screen interaction, CRED Money Interaction
These little dramatic moments were mostly us trying to make users smile and have a little fun while we were building them.
Designing all of these cool and serious things shaped my taste and judgment for what’ll work and what feels right. It always felt like building a monument in a sea of skyscrapers.
These projects and many more are the result of countless individuals' contributions over several years. Taking a moment to thank some I had the privilege of working closely with - Abhishek A, Aditya Madan, Aman Singh, Anoop Chidurala, Aswin K, Atul Khola, Gaurav Chandrakar, Indrajith Baby, Jibin Joseph, Malik Shaikh, Midhun Mohan, Naasha Taraporewala, Nandini Gangal, Nikhil Kirve, Ranjith Nair, Ravi Sankar, Richu Michael, Rishabh Mandhana, Sarath Chandran, Shivani Matlapudi, Siddhika Deshmukh, Varenya Pandya, Vitthal Bhat.