Post acquisition wizely redesign — How we made safe investing feel like a breeze.
December 2024 - January 2025
The Brief
Wizely began as a gold savings app. After its acquisition by OneCard, the mission became sharply defined: transform Wizely into a trusted, delightful investment platform focused on safe instruments like digital gold and fixed deposits. Our challenge? Ship an MVP in just 8 weeks that balances trust and simplicity with an experience that feels fast, friendly, and modern. The product had to cater to both cautious savers and casual first-time investors. It needed to be approachable like a UPI payment, yet reliable enough to handle real money — all while running lean with a compact team.
Deliverables
UX & UI Philosophies
Design System
Product Strategy
Illustration System
Custom Icons
What is Wizely?
Wizely is a personal finance app under the OneCard umbrella, designed to make safe investing accessible for everyone. It simplifies digital gold and fixed deposit investing, wrapping complex products into approachable, everyday experiences.
But this wasn’t just about building another investment app. We envisioned Wizely as a joyful hub for low-risk wealth creation — a home for safe-money products that doesn’t look or feel like a bank. Whether someone’s saving ₹100 or booking a ₹1 lakh FD, the tone had to remain light, visual, and human.
We leaned into sleek & simple user experience, friendly microcopy, and visuals that felt less “finance” and more “fun.” Wizely was designed to be the pocket companion for India’s cautious and curious investors — a platform that celebrates consistency over risk, and clarity over chaos.
How India invests?
Before we designed a single screen, we dove deep into India’s shifting investment patterns. We studied investment behavior across age groups, geographies, and income segments, spanning tech-savvy young investors to older users who prefer traditional advice. Here’s what we found –
These patterns guided everything from our UI layouts to the tone of microcopy — shaping a product that flexes across segments while staying true to simplicity.
Understanding the Competitors
To sharpen our product thinking, we conducted a detailed competitive analysis of three leading apps : Jar, Gullak, and Stable Money — each of which tackled the investing journey with its own unique approach. We compared product strategies, UX flows, and content positioning to understand what resonated with users, where friction arose, and what gaps still existed. This analysis gave us a grounded view of the current fintech landscape and helped us carve out Wizely’s differentiated approach.
This analysis gave us clarity on what users expect — and what they were missing. We built Wizely to meet those needs, minus the clutter, plus the fun. Here were the key takeaways :
UX Strategy & Philosophies
With deep user insights and competitor patterns in hand, we built a UX strategy that could hold up under scale, uncertainty, and real-world investor behavior. Instead of optimizing only for conversions, we focused on building trust, simplifying decisions, and encouraging long-term engagement. Our core UX principles –
These principles weren’t just ideas — they were embedded in every screen, shaping a product that was gentle for beginners, yet fast for power users resulting in a UI that respected people’s money and made investment feel refreshingly calm.
UI Principles
While our UX strategy guided the overall flow and user behavior, we grounded the visual experience in a set of focused UI principles — built for clarity, flexibility, and emotional engagement.
These UI philosophies ensured that Wizely felt familiar, yet different. Friendly, but never juvenile. And always respectful of the user’s time and trust.
Mantis DS – The Powerhouse of Wizely
At the heart of Wizely lies Mantis DS — a lean, scalable, and designer-friendly design system tailored for safe-money products. We weren’t just designing for digital gold and fixed deposits; we were laying the foundation for what could include bonds, recurring deposits, sovereign gold bonds, and more.
Mantis DS offered a tight set of reusable UI components, thoughtful tokens, and enough flexibility for designers to adapt layouts without breaking consistency. Its structure made it easy for developers to plug and play, which helped our team ship new features at record speed.
Mantis Illustration System
To differentiate Wizely from generic fintech apps, we crafted a playful, handcrafted aesthetic featuring a pink bird and bee — mascots that guide users across journeys.
To streamline illustration creation and reduce turnaround, we built a semi-automated AI-powered illustration pipeline. We extracted the visual DNA from our initial handcrafted assets and converted it into a JSON spec — capturing stroke weights, character proportions, palette constraints, and stylistic quirks.
By feeding this spec to ChatGPT, we enabled quick generation of illustrations by simply inputting a narrative prompt (e.g., “bird lifting a toggle component”). This pipeline drastically reduced design-illustration handoff time and empowered our team to scale visuals on-demand — a small system with big impact.
To streamline illustration creation and reduce turnaround, we built a semi-automated AI-powered illustration pipeline. We extracted the visual DNA from our initial handcrafted assets and converted it into a JSON spec — capturing stroke weights, character proportions, palette constraints, and stylistic quirks.
By feeding this spec to ChatGPT, we enabled quick generation of illustrations by simply inputting a narrative prompt (e.g., “bird lifting a toggle component”). This pipeline drastically reduced design-illustration handoff time and empowered our team to scale visuals on-demand — a small system with big impact.
Mantis Illustration System
To differentiate Wizely from generic fintech apps, we crafted a playful, handcrafted aesthetic featuring a pink bird and bee — mascots that guide users across journeys.
To streamline illustration creation and reduce turnaround, we built a semi-automated AI-powered illustration pipeline. We extracted the visual DNA from our initial handcrafted assets and converted it into a JSON spec — capturing stroke weights, character proportions, palette constraints, and stylistic quirks.
By feeding this spec to ChatGPT, we enabled quick generation of illustrations by simply inputting a narrative prompt (e.g., “bird lifting a toggle component”). This pipeline drastically reduced design-illustration handoff time and empowered our team to scale visuals on-demand — a small system with big impact.