Bengaluru-based fintech unicorn CRED has upgraded its UI design with the launch of a new design experience called Charcoal, an addition to their earlier design languages consisting of Topaz, Fabrik, Copper and NeoPOP. 

CRED has revamped its homepage with a fresh and improved design using the fifth design update, Charcoal. The main focus of this update is to enhance the user experience by restructuring the layout and content organisation, making it easier for users to navigate the site and improve its functionality. 

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What Charcoal Brings to the Table

The new homepage has been divided into two sections: the finance suite and the offer oasis. The finance suite is designed to be free of distractions, while the offer section is located at the top of the screen for easy access to exciting deals. Additionally, the Explore CRED section has been added to showcase essential products such as credit card and utility bill payments available on CRED. The grid layout is visually appealing and enables users to find and explore new offerings with ease.

The My Money section has been exclusively dedicated to the financial activities of CRED members, encompassing the Flash withdrawal limit, Mint investments, and available cash balance. This feature enables users to effortlessly monitor and manage their financial transactions from a single convenient location. It has been designed to include technical solutions for data security concerns and timely notifications regarding upcoming bills to avoid missing any payment deadlines. Moreover, members can now view their potential rewards by paying their bills on time, encouraging them to prioritise payments and earn exciting rewards.

In addition to these updates, the bottom navigation has been reimagined entirely to make regular transactions smoother. All payment options are now located conveniently in the bottom section, allowing users to access the “Scan and Pay” option with just one swipe. Moreover, the “Pay Contacts” feature facilitates the transfer or receipt of money from friends with ease.

“Art is at the heart of everything that we create”

CRED has always focused on giving users a sleek and unique design experience. The team believe design should inspire creativity, bring out emotions, seek a purpose beyond the most obvious and most importantly, design should touch humans in ways beyond our collective imagination.

CRED has gone through four generations of design systems. The first one, Topaz, launched in 2018, was based on flat and reductionist minimalism, with a focus on simple typography and high-performance payment systems. The second one, Fabrik, retained the design principles of Topaz but included more advanced, usable, and beautiful design constructs, such as skeuomorphic card designs and a first-of-its-kind rewards interface. Copper was the third upgrade, which moved away from reductionism to a more physical metaphor-driven user interface and included a customisable back-end-driven design system called Synth. Finally, NeoPOP was launched last year, which aimed to provide a visual and functional balance that flows seamlessly between different product offerings.

“We envision CRED as a mall with various member offerings—ranging from arcades shopping [to] financial services. When you envision CRED as a destination, it must have a personality which members find hard to ignore. This personality is provided by design”, Ketan Jogani, Head of Mobile Tech, shared with AIM in an exclusive interview.

Giving Back to the Community

CRED was one of the few startups to have open-sourced their previous UI framework NeoPOP, allowing developers worldwide to implement NeoPOP designs in their products at scale. 

However, there are very few companies that give back to the community or acknowledge the use of these resources although they have largely been created using open-source tools and libraries.

Kailash Nadh, CTO of online stock broker Zerodha had told AIM that if a company only cares about making money and increasing its value, and sees engineering as a means to achieve those goals, then it’s unlikely that it will have a culture of caring about technology and contributing to free and open-source software (FOSS). Therefore, experts suggest that companies need to prioritise creating a culture of care from the top down in order to encourage their tech teams to value FOSS and their contributions to it. To achieve this, companies need to establish work environments that facilitate cultural and structural transformations in leadership.

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