Business Banking #12
Russian
Agricultural Bank
This is one of Russia's top-5 banks by assets, 100% state-owned, originally built to finance the agricultural sector. Today it's a full-service bank — retail, business, corporate lending — while still holding a dominant share of agri-sector financing nationwide.
Problems in Early 2022
Legacy UX/UI
The interface treated every action and field as equally important. Routine tasks took longer than they should, and new clients faced a steep learning curve navigating logic built for internal operations, not their workflows.
Architecture
A monolithic architecture meant every new product required changes across shared code, and account data often lagged by hours — sometimes a full day — delaying releases and leaving clients unsure of their real balance.
Analytics Tooling
The team had no tools for product analytics — every question meant a manual database export, turning what should've taken hours into days. Decisions on new features often relied on guesswork instead of real usage data.
New Processes
Team
I built a lean team of two product designers and one graphic designer, splitting ownership across product lines from day one. That structure let each designer own a full slice of the product, not just a single screen or task.
Tools & Workflow
We picked tools the team already knew: Notion, Jira, Miro, Figma — to plug into the existing PM and engineering workflow from day one instead of adding onboarding overhead. Yandex Metrica gave us the analytics layer that had been missing entirely.
Discovery
We audited the current product together, then ran in-depth interviews to map users' actual journeys and jobs-to-be-done — replacing assumptions carried over from the old version with real behavioral data.
Research
Field Interviews
Prior experience with RSHB gave me direct access to farmers for in-depth interviews, skipping cold outreach entirely. These confirmed several of the problems we'd flagged and surfaced two distinct journeys — business owners (farmers) and accountants — each with different needs and friction points.
Unmoderated Testing
I'd used Useberry before and knew it was a solid way to get feedback ahead of an MVP. Once we had prototypes of the redesigned flows, we ran first-click, 5-second, preference, and single-task tests. The results fed straight into MVP development, helping us simplify both key scenarios even further.
New Product, New Look
Inside the MVP
A few months in, we shipped our first release — covering core payment and invoicing flows, a catalog of key products, and the full application process. Every screen was built around a single clear action, replacing the cluttered, equally-weighted layout we started with.
Payment Flow
Simplified the form, added smart suggestions, and cut everything non-essential, lowering cognitive load and time-on-task.
A counterparty directory, smart suggestions based on past payments, and autofill cut the number of errors in payment orders.
Invoicing Flow
Deep interviews surfaced a clear pattern: invoices were built from the same handful of items, month after month, almost like a routine.
Good design lives in the details, so we looked for a way to handle that repetition without losing the simplicity we'd built.
The answer was smart suggestions, drawn from past invoices and common item groups. The feature found a loyal audience fast.
Design System
Foundation
We built a token-based design system for the team to work in comfort, documenting every aspect meticulously so behavior stayed transparent for both designers and engineers.
Motion & Code
We built the micro-interaction animations and prepped the production-ready code ourselves, which saved front-end resources and let us keep tight, precise control over the final look and feel.
Storybook Sync
We kept the full component library regularly synced with our Storybook instance, so we could always be sure the design matched the shipped code exactly, down to the last detail.
Illustrations
Simplicity First
Our audience is pragmatic, and usability matters far more than visual flair. So the product itself stayed simple, clean, and focused on making every flow efficient and clear, and we found an illustration style that complemented that simplicity perfectly.
The Style
Together with our illustrator, we developed a distinct, memorable vector style, easy to scale across any surface. It was built directly in Figma for fast editing, covering every size from icons to key visuals, with a growing library of 500+ unique pieces.
On the Shelf
The new style fit the interface naturally, adding emotion and emphasis to key product showcases while strengthening the brand. It earned recognition across the company, and was scaled to other divisions of the bank.
Beyond the Screen
The new style resonated in marketing too, from social media posts to printed materials. We also designed a minimal, striking look for the plastic cards.
Mobile Application
The need to make a payment finds a farmer mid-field, right in the cab of a tractor or combine. A mobile app was the answer.
In two months, our small team shipped an MVP, covering invoices, payments, transfers, and every one of the bank's core products.
What We Achieved
Over the year, the product grew from an MVP into a mature, full-scale platform, with infrastructure built to support new products, not just survive incoming requests. Onboarding got faster, driving stronger activation, and migration from the legacy system was near-total within months of release, with minimal friction for existing clients.
Looking back, the biggest win wasn't any single screen — it was building a small, focused team that could move from research to shipped product in weeks, not quarters, backed by a design system solid enough that it outlived the project itself and scaled across other divisions of the bank, shaping how the company approached design going forward.
