Affstore

The Affstore is an affiliate program that focuses on easily convertible financial products. It brings together some of the most popular products in the fintech world into a single program.

We built this platform from scratch, with me as the sole designer. The project was a success and currently they have over millions of users registered from all over the world.

I joined the project at its inception, when we had to urgently create an MVP to validate the idea. Working as the only designer on the team, we successfully launched the project within tight deadlines and continued to develop it iteratively during it's massive user growth.

Working on this platform was exciting and full of challenges, but I want to highlight three things in particular I worked on that I'm particularly proud of:

1. Platform for Affiliates

2. Design System

3. User Card

Affiliate Platform

My initial focus was building the Affstore Platform itself. My task was to take the existing unbranded affiliate program and translate it to a completely new platform with a new design, updated logic, and new constraints.

I was able to achieve this by working iteratively and collaborating closely with the development team and stakeholders. Following the project’s launch, I formulated hypotheses on user behaviour and monitored the UX’s effectiveness, to further iterate and improve the flows.

Design system

I had full ownership of this project’s design system, which is something I take great pride in. A significant part of my work on this project was focused on creating a consistent visual style that would survive developers and could eventually handed over to other designers without bottlenecks.

I created a comprehensive design system and template that would empower other designers to quickly create new interfaces for the platform.

Then, I worked with engineering to build a library of design elements that could be easily used in the code. Additionally, we prepared the groundwork for B2B partners to customise our platform to match their own visual preferences, offering it as a white-label product.

The process

A Design System is a time investment, and time is money. We had limited time available, so our team’s efficiency and results could be heavily influenced by setting the correct processes. I set some processes to ensure that we could continue to have the benefits of our design system, so avoiding that its maintenance costs would outweigh the benefits.

Two things processes prevented us from descending into chaos: the first was ensuring that all requests related to the design system would go into a flow terminating into an exclusive design-only to-do list.

The second process was creating a change log for the Design System. Development was happening in parallel to design work, and it was crucial for us to keep components up to date both in production and in the design system. Without a formal tokenisation process that was deemed to costly to maintain, my solution was the changelog. Thanks to this tool we could periodically refer to it and update components in the style guide asynchronously, ensuring that everything was always up to date.

User card

Another important feature I want to showcase was the redesign of the admin panel for managers, one of our internal tools.

This being an internal tool, it would be easy to fall into the usual pitfalls of not giving it the right amount of attention compared to user-facing features. I took a different approach: the entire Affstore operation is managed from there, so the efficiency of the entire department depends on the quality of the admin interface.

Being my co-workers the end-users, I conducted research and a series of interviews, and I discovered that there was a need for a centralised place to gather all client information, like a specialised CRM. This culminated in the creation of the User Card, which had a big impact in the team efficiency.