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 — from Gen Z investors on YouTube to senior citizens relying on bank advisors. Here’s what we found –
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40% of investors in India are under 30 — digital-first, mobile-savvy, and prefer clarity over jargon.
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Digital Gold is booming, with 65% of millennials preferring it over physical gold.
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Young investors love direct stocks, but also show strong interest in simplified, guided experiences.
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Trust is built through clear, consistent design that feels intuitive and reliable across all user types – older & the younger
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.
Focus
Automates gold savings using spare change from daily transactions
Strengths
Habit-forming through daily saving, gamified elements (spin wheel, rewards), and simplified gold-related language
Focus
Emotionally framed savings goals and recurring gold contributions
Strengths
Emotionally framed goals (e.g. wedding, vacation funds), minimal UI, flexible saving via UPI
Focus
Fixed deposits from a variety of partner banks
Strengths
Transparent interest payouts, wide FD catalog, customizable term options, real-time maturity previews, and a swift booking flow
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 some key takeaways from the competitive analysis –
Defer friction
Unlike Stable Money, we decided not to prompt KYC upfront. Users can browse freely and only complete documentation when initiating a transaction.
Humanize the product
Most competitors underutilized visuals. Wizely’s bird and bee mascots turned our flows into a narrative experience.
Simplicity wins
Overloading users with options or numbers (as seen in Stable Money) can be off-putting. We leaned into clean layouts and progressive disclosure.
Emotional framing builds trust
Like Gullak, we used goals (“Save ₹100/week”) to make investment feel personal and approachable.
Gamification works, when subtle
Jar’s success with daily saving streaks inspired us to add nudges like profile completion and milestone tracking.
Trust is visual
Showing logos, vault details, and product partnerships in a clear, contextual way helped build user confidence.
UX Strategies & 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 –
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Trust and
Transparency
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Engagement
Through Delight
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Guide,
Don’t Push
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Simplicity
and Speed
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.
Clarity Over Complexity
Conversational Interface
Purposeful Delight
Modularity
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 Design System
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.
AI Powered 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.
Style
Hand-drawn, brush-textured, with intentionally uneven strokes and naive charm
Palette
Bright lime green, deep teal, coral pink, sky blue — grounded on white.
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 GPT-based tools, we enabled quick generation of illustrations by simply inputting a narrative prompt (Example : “bird lifting a gold coin”). This pipeline drastically reduced design-illustration handoff time and empowered our team to scale visuals on-demand – a small system with big impact.
Icons & Icon Finder Plugin
As part of building a scalable, designer-friendly system, we developed a custom Figma Icon Finder Plugin for the Wizely team. This plugin empowered both designers and developers to find, preview, and use our app’s iconography with ease. Link Kaustubh
