Introducing Current 5.0
Evolving our Product Design language as we grow with our members.
The Current app has evolved greatly since we launched our first product, for teens, in 2017. When we launched our teen product in 2017, we took a design-focused approach for targeting our demographic.
We’ve seen insane growth in the past year which presented an unexpected design challenge. While it’s easy to update a brand and website, an app takes a lot more work, and we wanted a consistent experience from when a user discovered Current, to when they signed up and became a member.
In order to be consistent with our ever changing branding, we were updating the look and feel of our app nearly every year. When we first launched our teen product the design needs were extremely different than were needed for our personal checking accounts, with an expanded and different feature set.
The question we posed to ourselves was this: How do we create a more modern and consistent experience, that can easily evolve?
With 5.0, we’ve also developed a more consistent UI library of components.
I’m particularly proud of our new UI library. The components are laid out nicely and we take advantage of all of Sketch’s latest features. Any new components would need to be considered and discussed prior to being implemented so that we don’t design or build new components when existing ones work.
We improved parity between Android and iOS so that the app would be easier to design and develop, while maintaining native system conventions.
When it comes to iconography, a rule was established that every icon had to be drawn at the size it was displayed. This guarantees our icon line weights and shapes were unified across the board. It’s more work to design the same icons at smaller sizes, but we believe it’s an important detail.
And finally, we’re excited to add dark mode support on Android!
Growing the design team is a huge focus for us in 2021, and I’d love to tell you more about the problems we’re solving. Check out our careers page, or send me an email to learn more.
If you haven’t already, check out our previous design post Unique Solutions For Unique Lives, and download Current 5.0 on iOS or Android to see our refreshed 5.0 design!
Cheers,
Stephen M. Levinson
Lead Design @ Current
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