Status

Case Study

The Company

Founded by former Citi & Goldman Sachs data scientists, Status Money is a tech company whose mission is to bring the big-data capabilities of Wall Street to everyone. Conceived of initially as a PMF (personal-finance management) web application, it has evolved into a suite of tools and services to help people manage their money.

The Design Team

Just Me

reporting to the CEO + Founder.
Working very closely with the front-end team

Types of products I've designed and launched with Status

A responsive web-app
Native iOS and Android versions of the web-app
A marketing site for the company
A company blog
A chrome extension
A video meeting tool
A social network
A COVID economic dashboard
Additional internal and customer-facing experiments

Major Features

PFM Tool
Responsive Design
Native App
Account Linking
Chrome Extension
Financial Coaching
Credit Card
Rewards
Crypto Investments
Future Planning
COVID Dashboard
Opportunities
Social Feed
Subscription Model
Peer Comparisons

Everything was designed to work across multiple devices and screen sizes.

My approach

Research a feature
Create initial exploratory wireframes and mockups to help set a design direction
Create iterations based on the selected direction with a new set of options and directions within the constraints set by the previous stages of design.
- Figma made it easy to track what had already been explored and revisit earlier directions when needed
Iterate through 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3 versions until a stronger 1.0 starts to emerge
- Create many iterations, compare them side by side, and explore even weak directions early so they do not resurface later
Narrow in on the strongest path and turn it into a practical solution

The Challenge

The real challenge of this role was being responsible for nearly every aspect of the company's design.

Finding ways to stay organized was crucial
Moving quickly without sacrificing solution quality
Using outside inspiration together with ideas grounded in research and product data
Estimating, planning, and syncing design progress with the rest of the team
Creating representative JSON data sets so designs were tested with realistic content
Designing for worst-case scenarios, like unusually long labels or edge-case account states

Details

A "golden opportunity" animation helped avoid awkward tooltip flyout repositioning and resizing

Skills

Prototyping

Figma - Basic page transitions
Principle - Elaborate animations
HTML & CSS - In context, with real data

Information Architecture

Developed a company wiki with a glossary
Collaborated with backend and frontend teams, along with company executives, on consistent nomenclature

Data Visualization

Data visualization work ranged from benchmark comparisons to dashboard concepts that made dense financial information easier to scan and act on.