Ian Dolan

background

Refreshed Tendy's identity and app as the product shifted toward requesting payments and paying straight from a bank, card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. Incremental additions had left a patchwork interface, with a dark home screen opening onto a white wallet, inconsistent components, and vestigial elements from earlier versions.

Before and after

approach

Partnered directly with the founder and dev team to take the rebrand from first concept to shipped product in three months. Replaced the old mark with a cleaner, modern logo and wordmark, then aligned every screen under one dark green system and a shared component library, with accessibility built in from the start. Introduced a card system to onboard new users and surface useful progress, like payments left until the next reward, and gave Send and Request equal weight on the home screen.

outcome

Shipped to the App Store and Google Play, earning positive user feedback and a modest lift in completed transactions.

background

Ads for a larger Chase Sapphire campaign via Droga5. Collaborated with another designer on every placement in the 14th Street–Union Square station, from verticals and turnstiles to animated triptychs: over 150 designs in all. Worked across departments to keep the campaign cohesive, and with printers to ensure a seamless hand-off of final files.

background

Co-led with the Social Media Manager to refresh GOBankingRates' stagnant social presence across accounts and channels. Built the new look around the company's trademarked phrase, "Live Richer", which gave the content personality and helped meet a strict deadline. Grew audiences 35% and sustained engagement, along with site traffic and ad revenue.

outcome

28% fewer new-user transaction cancellations, and a net-new rewards program that lifted repeat transactions among lapsed users.

background

Tendy lets anyone send or receive money by message or QR code, whatever payment app the other person uses, with web flows that work even for non-users. Owned product design and marketing as the sole designer. That universality made messaging, trust and expectations harder to get right.

problem

Users onboarded in person thrived while organic users stalled. Research across email promotions, Reddit posts, existing users and drop-off metrics showed why: new users were unsure of Tendy's purpose and cancelled transactions often, citing unease with the payment process. Power users had almost all been onboarded through guided demos that smoothed over gaps the app itself never explained.

key decisions

Translated the in-person demo into the organic journey, using demo scripts and recordings to rebuild onboarding around showing, not telling, so the "wow moment" landed before old payment habits won out. Refreshed top-of-funnel collateral and app store pages to set expectations before install. Added a net-new rewards program to encourage sustained use and bring lapsed users back.

onboarding sample, before + after

rewards program development

trade-offs

Rebuilt the early and mid journey from a clean slate rather than patching individual screens. With a lean team and patchy historical data, moved on preliminary research and best practice instead of waiting for cleaner numbers, then validated against post-launch metrics.

result

Confirmed the initial read: the gap between onboarding experiences was eroding new users' trust. Successful transactions and deposits rose alongside the drop in cancellations, and the rebuilt journey became stable ground for later features.

outcome

25% faster design-to-dev handoff across a distributed team, and design review removed as a bottleneck.

problem

As Tendy's only designer, every screen, campaign and handoff ran through one person. Without a shared system, components drifted from screen to screen, and Marketing and an international dev team both had to wait on design to answer basic questions.

key decisions

Built a component library covering buttons, payment method rows, navigation, cards, headers and dialogs, with light and dark variants for each surface. Set the responsive framework and accessibility standards both teams build against. Documented component usage and handoff standards so Marketing and Engineering could self-serve instead of routing every question through design.

component variants from the library

outcome

Content and Marketing could publish independently across devices without developer support, on a 30+ page site rebuilt to WCAG standards.

background

Gro Intelligence uses AI to deliver insights on global agricultural markets and climate. Outside firms had delivered a new brand and a Strapi (headless CMS) site meant to let anyone at the company build pages from prebuilt modules.

problem

In practice, the site fell short of industry and accessibility standards. Improper breakpoints, unreliable tags and classes, and broken modules hampered every page, and basic fixes had been de-prioritized for lack of developer time.

key decisions

Co-led an internal audit with the UX/UI team lead instead of benchmarking competitors, partnering with Marketing, Strapi's main users, to surface pain points. Compared the original agency mocks to the live site module by module, reviewed code for duplicate tags, and used WCAG as the accessibility baseline. Standardized the type hierarchy and documented breakpoint rules so new modules would behave predictably.

before and after

trade-offs

With little developer capacity, chose a prioritized roadmap and planned hand-off schedule over a single rebuild. Reworked designs for broken and missing modules shipped at a steady cadence no team had to absorb at once, and the audit made later site work faster.