CRED’s design philosophy

Recently, CRED open-sourced its UI framework ‘NeoPOP’, the state-of-the-art framework that powers the CRED app. With this release, the company enables developers to work on a tested framework, empowering anyone in the world to implement NeoPOP designs throughout their products and do it at scale. 

Check out CRED’s open-source UI framework here. 

In an exclusive interaction with Analytics India Magazine, Ketan Jogani, Lead–Mobile Tech at CRED takes us through the journey of CRED’s design philosophy, the ideology behind its UI framework and more. 

“The possibilities for NeoPOP’s use are endless and at CRED, we are excited to see all of them”, remarks Jogani. Further, he believes that such collaborations could help innovation come alive. 

Bringing designs to life 

“Open-sourcing design frameworks can enable developers from all over the world to contribute to furthering product design. Building for and with the community is part of what drives us at CRED and by open-sourcing NeoPOP, we are eager to see developers take it for a spin and make it their own,” says Jogani. 

“We created NeoPOP with a lot of passion and enthusiasm, and the entire app is built using the same code base. It’s performant, production-ready and extensible. NeoPOP is an exciting new design direction; it is a versatile design language that powers our app [that has diverse offerings—from payments to e-commerce] with great consistency and beauty,” says Jogani of the newly updated design. 

All about collaboration 

“Giving back to the community is a tenet that we follow at CRED”, says Jogani, and says that sharing their work and learnings with the larger community exemplifies their belief in the value of giving back. 

Further, he shares that this is the second design framework they have open-sourced in support of their initiative to contribute to the collective and drive innovation through collaboration—“Our GitHub repository has both, the newly released NeoPOP UI framework and Synthour—the previous Neumorphic UI framework.”

CRED revealed that it launched NeoPOP—the fourth design update—with the intention to take a beautiful design and make it accessible to its members. 

What’s in it for CRED? 

In response to our queries about the benefits of taking a unique approach in open-sourcing their works, CRED commented that when the community experiments with and builds on what they create; they benefit from the subsequent discoveries. They believe that by open-sourcing their NeoPOP framework, they are not only empowering the community to experiment with CRED’s design philosophy but also paving the way for greater product experiences as a result of such experimentation. 

Since NeoPOP went open source, they have received diverse suggestions on implementing their code and how to do things uniquely. 

Ketan Jogani delights in the responses received—“This is wonderful to see and has contributed massively to our learnings.” 

Considering CRED’s approach, Jogani says that they see open sourcing as a crucial path to achieve global maxima in talent density. He believes that as long as their code is available in public for developers to tinker with—it will help improve their code while simultaneously encouraging their team members’ compounding and competitiveness. 

Inside CRED’s design philosophy 

According to CRED “Through the years, one of the most critical outcomes of design—that it should solve a problem—has been confused with the design itself.”

Design should inspire creativity, bring out emotions and delight, and see a purpose beyond the obvious. Most importantly, design should touch humans in ways beyond their collective imagination. 

CRED believes that it is just as important to offer an aesthetic experience to users as it is to be efficient and easy to use. “Our goal is to build the most beautiful digital experience for our members. Something that works efficiently with a deep focus on creating moments of delight”, reads CRED’s Manifesto.

“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”, concludes Jogani.