Sections

Brookwell

At a glance

Role
Contract product designer
Team
2 founders
5 engineers
3 designers, including me
Timeline
Aug to Nov 2025
Platforms
iOS and Android

I led product design end to end for Brookwell, a bank account that earns up to 10% while keeping the crypto behind it completely out of sight.

In three months I went from workshops with the founding team to six core flows, from sign-up to card management, then built the design system and dev-ready specs for its 2026 launch. The waitlist is now live.

Context

What if your bank account actually earned something?

Brookwell pairs an FDIC-insured checking account earning 1% with a stablecoin-powered savings account earning 10%, all in one mobile app.

The constraint: it’s a regulated bank account, so identity checks (KYC) and an SSN are required by law. I couldn’t remove them, only choose when and how to ask.

Problem

Two worlds in one account

Before designing, I ran sessions with the founding team on how money flows, where the risk is, and what users need before they’ll trust it. Merging regulated banking with DeFi surfaced three problems.

  1. 10% sounds too good to be true

    After FTX and Celsius, a high rate reads as a catch, and words like “DeFi” and “on-chain” only confirm it.

  2. Asking for an SSN too early

    Asking for an SSN and ID before someone feels committed is a major drop-off risk.

  3. Yield you can’t see

    Passive earnings are easy to forget. If people can’t see their money grow, they never feel the product’s value.

Root cause

Trust breaks when people have to understand the machinery behind their money.

Persona

Meet Alice

Alice came out of our user research. She’s 24, works in tech in NYC, and found Brookwell on TikTok. She stands in for our audience: Gen Z, 18 to 30, financially curious but skeptical.

  1. Wants her money to work

    Drawn to passive income and crypto’s upside, not its mechanics.

  2. Has watched people get burned

    Friends lost money in crypto, so a high rate makes her look for the catch.

  3. Trusts TikTok, then checks the fine print

    Finds products through creators, but reads reviews before handing over anything personal.

The tension

She wants her money to earn more, but one hint of a catch and she’s gone.

Alice’s customer journey in eight stages: GTM, PII, KYC, open, card, fund, earn, and pay
Her eight-stage journey, from TikTok to spending with her card, became the backbone of every flow.

Approach

Yield should feel like a feature, not a mechanism

In our competitive analysis, Robinhood stood out: it made investing approachable by cutting the jargon and friction. We set out to do the same for yield.

How might we

Make 10% feel as safe and ordinary as a savings account?

Two principles we checked every flow against

  1. Show the outcome, hide the mechanism

    People should always see what their money is doing, never have to learn how.

  2. Earn trust before asking for it

    Ask for the least first, and never ask without a reason.

From lo-fi to hi-fi

Lo-fi, take one. One card at a time with its actions underneath: clear, but you can’t see all your cards.
Take two. Stacked like a wallet, so every card is in view; tap one to lift it out.
Take three. The stack opens into a sheet, keeping the overview and bringing back the balance and actions.
Hi-fi. Take three’s structure, in soft metallic cards.

Solution

Three decisions that carry the product

  1. Speak bank, not blockchain

    Words like “DeFi” and “on-chain” sound like volatility, not savings. So balances are in USD and savings is simply a high-yield savings account. Crypto-savvy users can still fund with stablecoins; everyone else never has to think about them.

  2. Start light, and say why you’re asking

    Sign-up starts with just an email, and the SSN and ID come later. Every step says why it’s needed: an unexplained request for personal details is exactly what a scam looks like, and a reason is what makes it look like a bank.

  3. Yield you can watch grow

    Accrued yield sits right under the balance, updated daily, so every visit shows the account at work. It’s proof, and a reason to come back.

Prototyping

Six core flows, prototyped

I prototyped six core flows, from sign-up to card management, and pressure-tested them in weekly critiques. Sign-up, funding, and card management are above. Here are accounts, spending, and card creation.

Accounts. Every account and its 30-day growth, with a switcher instead of a long scroll.
Account details. As you scroll, the balance shrinks into a bar that stays on top.
Spending. Tap a slice of the bar to see one category and its share.
The full flow: categories, a breakdown chart, and the details behind any purchase.
Card creation. From an empty wallet to a new card, with controls like spend limits and expiry.
Card styling. Soft metallic colors, modern enough for Gen Z.

Design system

I built the system the app runs on, with tokens for color, type, spacing, and radius, then annotated every component with its anatomy and behavior.

Global colors: brand ivory and white, a neutral gray scale, blue and green accents, and white alpha levels
Global colors: the palette every token draws from.
Semantic color tokens for surfaces and text, each mapped to a base token and a use case
Semantic tokens name each color by its job, so engineers pick by use, not by hex.
Type scale in Neue Haas Grotesk Display: Headline 1, Headline 2, Body 1, and Caption, with size, line height, letter spacing, and token
One typeface, four styles.
Annotated handoff spec for containers: account summary, account information, and transaction list, with anatomy and behavior
A handoff spec for containers.

Reflection

The hardest part wasn’t the screens. It was earning trust.

I knew the foundations of fintech, but not deeply, so I put myself through an intense crash course in banking, KYC, and stablecoins before I could design with confidence. The real challenge was designing for people who expect a catch. For them a clear screen isn’t enough: anything that looks hidden reads as the catch.

  1. Next time, test the order of asks sooner

    Usability testing came after my contract ended, so the sign-up order rests on research and workshops. Research shows what people say they’d do; only testing shows where they actually drop off. I’d run a few quick tests before handoff, even scrappy ones.

  2. Two questions I handed off

    Does asking for the SSN later reduce drop-off? Does seeing yield every day bring people back?

This work is for professional viewing only.

Email me at jesslyn_ruswan@berkeley.edu if you are a hiring manager or recruiter and would like to learn more!

StoryPrototypes