Background

Pocket.id is an early-stage Indonesian fintech app built around a simple premise: money management shouldn't feel like accounting. The vision was a cashflow app that works naturally for how people actually spend: by category, by habit, by family. And a brand presence trustworthy enough to earn user confidence before the app even launched.

I came in as the sole senior designer across the entire product surface: responsible for naming, brand identity, the full V1 app design, and the company website: while supervising a junior designer on a remote workstream.

Problem

Two distinct challenges defined this engagement, one per deliverable.

For the app: Most budgeting apps ask users to think like accountants: inputting every transaction manually, reconciling totals, reviewing dense charts. But the real behavior is simpler: people mentally split their money into buckets. "This month's transport. Food. Shopping." They don't need a ledger: they need a system that matches how they already think.

On top of that, this was a full 0-to-1 build: no existing users, no benchmarks, no historical behavior to design against. Every decision had to be grounded in research and stress-tested through concept testing: including flows most designers skip, like error states and edge cases.

For the website: The harder brief: how do you design a company website for an app that hasn't launched yet? No screenshots, no user reviews, no proof points. The only tool available was trust, and trust had to be designed deliberately.

💡 People doesn't have a reliable app to track their spending across bank

Solution

App: A cashflow product centered on category-based budgeting: letting users allocate spending limits per bucket (transport, food, shopping, etc.) and track progress in real time, with automatic spending detection to minimize manual input.

Website: A sleek, compact company profile built around trustworthy content, positioning Pocket.id as credible and safe before a single user had onboarded.

💡 One of many homepage explorations

Design Process

Chapter 1 — Naming, Brand & Mobile App

Naming & Identity

Started with a collaborative naming session with the founding team: running a structured name voting process across candidates before converging on "Pocket." The name was chosen for its immediacy and the intuitive metaphor it carries: keeping money close, organized, and accessible.

Logo design followed a full exploration arc: moodboard → sketch → visual refinement, completed in 5 days. Multiple directions were explored before landing on a mark that felt both trustworthy and approachable for a finance product targeting everyday users.

Research

Ran UX research over 3 focused days: understanding how users mentally categorize spending, what makes them abandon existing budgeting tools, and where automatic tracking could reduce friction. Competitive analysis mapped local and global budgeting apps: identifying gaps in simplicity and category flexibility that became design principles for Pocket.id.

Key insight: users don't think in transactions, they think in categories. Transport. Makan. Belanja. The app needed to reflect that mental model, not override it.

💡 Benchmarking, survey, collect data & learning user flow behaviour

Design

• Built full user flow and IA before touching screens: mapping happy path and corner cases upfront, so edge states were never an afterthought

• Ran multiple explorations across onboarding, homepage layout, tooltip patterns, and FAB options before converging

• Wireframes → concept test → Hi-Fi → final UT, across a 2-month design sprint

• Supervised a junior designer on a parallel app workstream: tracking progress via detailed Google Sheets (per-screen status, revision notes, dev handoff notes) and weekly syncs — maintaining output quality without micromanaging

💡 Information Architecture / Happy Flow and Wireframe process

Testing

Two rounds of user testing: an early concept test to validate the category-based budgeting model, and a final UT before handoff to validate flows and interaction details.

💡 Output of Pocket ID Mobile app

Chapter 2 — Company Website

The challenge

Designing a website for a product with no live screenshots, no user testimonials, and no track record. The brief was essentially: make people trust us enough to wait.

💡 Pocket ID website V.1

Design approach

• Conducted competitive analysis of similar fintech websites to identify what signals credibility in the category

• Built IA and wireframes focused on featuring Pocket.id's strongest differentiators, as the primary hook

• Made a deliberate call to surface bank banking and wallet partners (Arta Graha, Paprika) prominently. Because in fintech, institutional backing is trust. Users may not know the product yet, but they know what regulated financial partnerships signal

• Explored multiple Hi-Fi directions before converging on a sleek, compact visual language: clean enough to feel modern, structured enough to feel safe

• Collaborated with a copywriter (Ira Indah) by providing dummy copy as directional brief, then aligning on final copy with the team

• Supervised junior designer Kenny V. on the app workstream simultaneously throughout this phase

💡 Some of website visual explorations

Output

The website launched successfully. The final result was a clean, trustworthy company profile that communicated the app's vision and credibility.

→ Live at pocket.co.id

Impacts

The V1 app was completed and handed off. The website launched and remains live. For me, this engagement demonstrated across both deliverables:

• Trust as a design problem
  Making deliberate, strategic choices to build credibility for a product that had no social proof yet.

• End-to-end product ownership
  From brand naming and logo to full app UX to company website, all under one lead designer.

• 0-to-1 discipline
  Structured process under tight timelines: 5 days logo, 3 days research, 2 months full app, 1.5 months website.

• Design leadership
  Supervising a junior designer remotely across a parallel workstream while managing my own deliverables