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Digital experience

Financial services
Mobile app design
Product design
CLIENT
Ordo
DATE
2019
ROLE
Lead Designer
AGENCY
Biglight
📈
£50m
funding secured
🎨
iOS app
successfully launched
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Acquired by Neonomics
in 2025
Making open banking faster, smarter and more accessible.

Ordo is a fintech start-up designed to simplify peer-to-peer payments, allowing users to send and receive money securely without sharing sensitive financial details. The app also provides a centralised view for managing payment requests and receipts.

Biglight was engaged to help Ordo refine its product-market fit through a comprehensive UX strategy. This involved conducting in-depth user research, mapping user journeys, and iterating on the product’s core experience through prototyping and testing. Alongside UX/UI design, we also supported branding efforts and marketing asset creation to ensure a cohesive identity across all touchpoints. Our challenge was to create an intuitive digital experience that was both secure and easy to understand while aligning with the fintech industry’s regulatory requirements and best practices.

Constraints & challenges

  • User understanding: Early testing revealed that users struggled to grasp the product’s relevance.
  • Interaction & navigation issues: Usability testing uncovered pain points in interaction design and navigation.
  • Parallel design & development: The tight deadline required simultaneous design and development workflows.
  • Balancing business & user needs: Ensuring the product was both commercially viable and user-friendly.

Role & approach

As the UI/UX design team, our role was to translate user needs into a seamless digital experience. Our process included:

  • User research & journey mapping: Leveraging existing research and augmenting it with qualitative and quantitative insights.
  • Focus groups: One with Ordo’s founders to align on brand vision, and another with potential users to validate the concept.
  • Prototyping & testing: Iterative wireframing, prototyping, and usability testing to refine user interactions.
  • Design system creation: Establishing a pattern library for UI components to ensure scalability and consistency.
  • Agile collaboration: Working closely with developers to maintain design integrity within technical constraints.

Solutions delivered

  • Early-Stage Design System: Created a foundational design system to support rapid scaling.
  • MVP prototype: Built, tested, and refined based on user feedback to validate product-market fit.
  • Pattern library: Developed reusable UI components for consistency and efficiency.
  • User-centric navigation & interaction design: Addressed key usability concerns to enhance adoption.

Results & impact

Ordo secured funding from Nationwide’s £50m venture fund following the development of the MVP prototype. The app successfully launched on the Apple App Store in March 2020 and quickly gained traction in the market. The foundational design system established during the project enabled future scalability and iteration, ensuring a strong basis for long-term growth. In 2025, Ordo was acquired by Neonomics, reinforcing its continued impact and value within the fintech ecosystem.

Key learnings

Early usability testing highlighted the importance of strong user education and onboarding to improve adoption. Running parallel design and development workflows proved to be a viable, though challenging, approach that significantly accelerated iteration and deployment. Establishing a scalable design system from the outset ensured long-term consistency and facilitated future growth. Additionally, the success of Ordo—demonstrated through its funding and eventual acquisition—underscored the importance of industry validation in driving a fintech product’s success. These insights emphasise the need for clear user communication, structured design systems, and agile collaboration between design and development teams in future projects.