Bling
Rebuilding Bling around kids, not features
Parents think about their kids first, but Bling's app prioritized features in its navigation. I led a restructuring of the app that aligned the app experience with how parents think.
Mobile App
UX Research
5.7×
more likely to open the Mobile tab
~3×
more tasks completed in the task planner
15h → 1h
from signup to first recurring allowance
Team
Head of Product, CTO, CEO, and the engineering team
Timeline
Kicked off at a 2-day off-site · launched August 2026 · task tabs October 2026
Parents think kid-first. The app didn’t.
Bling helps parents manage family money and teach their kids financial literacy. But the app was organized by feature. To check a child’s card balance, you tapped one tile. To check that same child’s mobile plan, you scrolled to a different tile and found them again.
Three signals told us this was a problem:
Parents contacted support because they couldn’t find things
Mixpanel showed low adoption of features we had already validated
In usability tests, parents went to the Family tab first. They were looking for their kids, not for features.
The fix had been deprioritized for years.
I aligned leadership on what success meant before designing anything
We finally tackled it at a two-day off-site with the CEO, CTO and Head of Product, where I was tasked with leading the restructure.
I listed four possible success measures and narrowed them to the two we could measure: feature adoption and new-user activation. I set aside retention and support volume because they were too indirect to tie to this change.
Then I set four principles:
Design for the admin parent, who sets up and manages the account
Put kids’ activity first: balance, mobile data, savings, transactions
Make quick actions, like topping up a card, effortless
Keep engineering effort low, i.e. don’t touch the back end and no redesigning existing features
The CEO had also made standing apart from traditional banks a priority, so I looked for places where the new structure could show that.
I prototyped right away so we could test instead of debate
I went straight from the whiteboard to a working prototype in Figma Make, so leadership could react to a real, clickable navigation on day one of the off-site instead of debating sketches. After three rounds of feedback, we had a prototype we were ready to test with.
I first validated it via ten remote usability tests with Bling employees. I wrote ten tasks, ran the sessions over Google Meet and recorded each one. The recordings gave the team a shared reference for why we made each decision, and something to go back to later. I refined the prototype with each successive session before moving on to testing with ten actual parent-users of the app.
Once the structure held up, I moved to high fidelity.
Every kid became an entry point
Kid tiles on the home screen. Tap a child and see everything about them in one place. By the final iteration — during testing — parents found every feature without trouble.
“Add family member” where parents expected it, in the family overview on the home screen.
A fuller tab bar as a second route. Some people browse by person, others by feature, and still others by both, so the app supports both.
Skills in the tab bar. Financial-literacy content is a key differentiator for Bling. Putting it front and center shows parents we care about what their kids learn.
A friendly visual style that still feels trustworthy. Bright 3D illustrations make it feel family-friendly without looking like a toy.
What I traded away
No back-end changes and no redesigns of existing features. That kept engineering effort low and let us ship fast, but it meant the restructure could only change how parents find features, not how well those features work once they get there.
I also measured success by feature adoption and new-user activation rather than retention, because those were what this change could directly move. Retention is the longer-term test, and we’re still watching it.
Results
We launched the restructure in August 2026 and the new task tabs in October:
Parents were 5.7× more likely to open the Mobile tab
When the new task tabs shipped in a second phase in October, parents completed about 3× more tasks than before
The average time from signup to a parent’s first recurring allowance dropped from ~15 hours to ~1
That last number was the biggest win. Recurring transfers correlate strongly with retention, which matters a lot to Bling.
What's next: from finding to using
Parents can find features more easily now and usage has significantly increased for some of these. This has not been the case for all features yet, however, and the jury is still out on retention. Finding a feature isn't the same as getting value from it, and closing that gap is the next problem we're tackling.
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