Migrating customers from one banking product to another is one of the highest-stakes things a team can do. People are trusting you with their money, their salary, their standing orders and their sense of security. When we set out to move customers into STC Bank, we knew the migration would be judged less on the database cutover and more on a single human question: did it feel safe?

Design's job in a migration is not to make screens look good. It is to make an unfamiliar change feel like continuity. This is the story of how we approached that.

Start from fear, not features

Our first research sessions weren't about flows — they were about worry. We asked people what they were afraid would go wrong when a bank they use changes underneath them. The answers were consistent: “Will my money still be there?”, “Will my card stop working?”, “Will I have to set everything up again?” Those fears became our real requirements. Every screen in the migration had to answer at least one of them before it asked the customer to do anything.

Design the seams, not just the destination

It's tempting to pour energy into the shiny new home screen. But customers don't experience a migration as a destination — they experience it as a sequence of seams: the notification that it's coming, the moment they open the app mid-change, the first login, the first transaction. We mapped every one of those seams and treated each as a designed moment with its own copy, its own reassurance and its own clear exit.

What we prioritised

• Continuity of identity — familiar names, card art and balances carried across so nothing felt “reset”.
• Progressive disclosure — we never showed the whole migration at once; we revealed one confident step at a time.
• Always a status — the customer could always see where they were: what had moved, what was in progress, what needed them.
• Reversible confidence — clear support and “what happens if” answers within reach at every step.

Words did the heavy lifting

In a migration, copy is the product. A single vague sentence can undo months of engineering trust. We wrote in plain, calm, active language — “Your salary will arrive here from next month”, not “Beneficiary routing has been updated.” We removed apology from error states and replaced it with direction: what happened, and the one thing to do next.

Test the scary path, not the happy path

Happy-path demos are easy to love and dangerous to trust. We deliberately usability-tested the anxious paths: what a customer sees if they open the app halfway through the move, if a transfer is pending during cutover, if they log in on a new device the same week. Designing those edges is where migration trust is actually won or lost.

Rolling out in waves

We phased the migration in controlled waves rather than a single overnight switch. Each wave gave us live signal — support tickets, drop-off points, confused screens — that we fed straight back into copy and flow tweaks before the next wave. Design stayed in the loop the whole way through; the work didn't end at handoff, it ended when the numbers said people felt fine.

What we'd tell the next team

1. Treat trust as the primary metric. Everything else is secondary.
2. Design the transition, not just the arrival.
3. Write every sentence as if a worried person is reading it at midnight.
4. Ship in waves and let real behaviour edit your design.

A great migration is invisible. If customers barely remember it happening, that quiet is the highest compliment our craft can earn.

Fawazeer — the playful riddles families have shared during Ramadan for generations — is one of those traditions everyone in the region grows up with. So when we asked how STC Bank could show up during Ramadan in a way that felt genuinely ours, the answer wasn't a banner or a discount. It was a riddle a day.

The idea

The concept was simple enough to explain in a sentence: every day of Ramadan, open the app, solve a Fawazeer, and unlock a small reward. But simple concepts hide hard design problems. A daily ritual has to be effortless to return to, delightful enough to share, and fair enough that everyone can play — including customers using a screen reader or playing one-handed while cooking iftar.

Designing a daily loop

The heart of Fawazeer is the return visit. We designed the loop to be frictionless: a warm entry point on the home screen, a single riddle, an answer, an instant reward, and a gentle nudge that tomorrow's riddle is waiting. No dead ends, no “come back later” without a reason to.

What made it work

• One tap in. The day's riddle was never more than a tap from the home screen.
• Instant payoff. Rewards resolved immediately — celebration, not a loading spinner.
• Streaks with heart. We rewarded consistency without punishing the day someone missed.
• Arabic-first. Every riddle, animation and celebration was designed in Arabic first, then adapted — not the other way around.

Delight, on a deadline

Ramadan doesn't move for anyone's roadmap. We had a hard, immovable launch date, which forced a healthy discipline: decide early what makes Fawazeer feel like Fawazeer, and protect only that. We spent our animation budget on the two moments that mattered most — the reveal of the riddle and the burst of a correct answer — and kept everything else calm.

What happened

Fawazeer became a daily habit for a meaningful share of active customers, with strong return rates across the month and a spike in organic sharing as people compared streaks. But the number we were proudest of wasn't in a dashboard — it was the messages from customers saying it made the app feel like part of their Ramadan.

What we kept

Fawazeer taught the team a lasting lesson about seasonal design: cultural resonance beats novelty every time. A feature rooted in something people already love needs less convincing, less onboarding and less marketing. It simply feels right. That's a template we'll reach for again.

A round-up of the biggest things the design and product teams shipped this cycle. We publish these so the whole company can see the craft moving forward — and so anyone can point a stakeholder to “what actually changed.”

✦ Headline changes

• International transfers, rebuilt. A clearer journey with upfront fees, live exchange rates and a status you can actually follow. (See Mishari's case study.)
• Rewards & savings, seamless. The savings experience dropped several steps and now guides people to finish. (See Hossam's case study.)
• Faster onboarding. Fewer screens between “download” and “done”, with continuity carried over from migration.

✦ Improvements

• Refreshed home screen hierarchy — the things people do most are now the easiest to reach.
• New semantic color tokens rolled out across the app for consistent, accessible contrast.
• Clearer, calmer error and empty states in plain language.
• Motion pass on key transitions to make the app feel quicker and more responsive.

✦ For designers & developers

• Design Tokens 2.4 published to Figma and code — see the Design System Update.
• SADAD biller logos and “Pay with STC Bank” button standards added to Resources.
• 12 components refreshed with dark-mode parity.

✦ Coming next

• Merchant portal redesign entering design review.
• Accessibility pass on transfers and rewards.
• A shared icon library to speed up handoff between design, engineering and marketing.

Spotted something in the wild worth celebrating — or fixing? Drop it in the team channel and we'll fold it into the next notes.

Saving money is something almost everyone wants to do and almost no one finds easy. Our rewards-linked savings experience was supposed to make it effortless — but the first version did the opposite. This is how we found the friction and designed it out.

The problem

The original flow treated saving like opening a product: forms, choices, and financial jargon before any reward was visible. People started with intent and quietly gave up. Our analytics showed a steep drop right where the flow asked for a decision it hadn't yet earned. The reward — the reason to save — appeared far too late.

What research told us

• Customers wanted to see the benefit first, then the mechanics.
• The word “savings” carried baggage — it felt like commitment and paperwork.
• People abandoned when asked to make more than one decision at a time.
• Trust dipped whenever a number appeared without explanation.

The principles we designed to

1. Reward before effort

We flipped the order. The very first screen now shows what you'll earn, in concrete terms, before asking anything. Motivation arrives before the work.

2. One decision per screen

Every step asks for exactly one thing. No screen makes the customer hold two open questions in their head at once.

3. Sensible defaults

Where a choice could be pre-made safely, we made it — with an obvious way to change it. Most people accepted the default and finished in seconds.

4. Show the money working

After setup, a simple, honest visual shows the reward accruing. The feedback loop that was missing became the most-loved part of the feature.

The result

We cut the steps to start saving by roughly 40%, and completion roughly doubled. More importantly, the feature stopped feeling like a financial product and started feeling like a small, satisfying habit. When we rolled it out to everyone, support questions about “how do I start saving?” all but disappeared.

What we're carrying forward

The biggest lesson wasn't about savings at all. It was about sequence. Most “complicated” flows aren't too long — they're in the wrong order, asking for effort before they've shown value. We now audit every new flow with one question first: does the reward come before the work?

For many of our customers, sending money abroad isn't a feature — it's a lifeline to family. When a transfer feels uncertain, the anxiety is real and immediate. We audited the entire international transfer journey to find exactly where that uncertainty crept in, and rebuilt the moments that mattered most.

How we audited it

We walked the whole journey the way a customer does — from first tap to the moment money lands — and marked every point where a real person paused, hesitated, or reached for support. We paired that walk with support tickets and drop-off data, so intuition and evidence pointed at the same places.

The pain points we found

• Hidden costs. Fees and exchange rates appeared late, so the amount received was a surprise — the worst kind in a transfer.
• Silent status. After sending, customers had no honest sense of where their money was, so they assumed the worst and contacted support.
• Beneficiary friction. Adding and reusing recipients was fiddly, especially for the people customers send to most often.
• Jargon. Banking and compliance language made a stressful task feel more foreign than it needed to.

The improvements we shipped

Show the real numbers, upfront

Fees and the live exchange rate now appear before the customer commits, alongside a clear “amount they'll receive.” No surprises at the end.

A status you can follow

We replaced silence with a simple, truthful progress view — sent, processing, on its way, received — so customers can reassure themselves without contacting anyone.

Recipients that remember

Frequent beneficiaries are now front and centre, so a repeat transfer to family takes seconds, not a fresh form.

Plain human language

We rewrote the journey in the words customers actually use, and moved compliance requirements into moments where they make sense instead of blocking the start.

What changed

Drop-off at the moments we targeted fell, repeat transfers got quicker, and support contacts asking “where is my money?” went down noticeably. The journey went from a source of anxiety to something customers could trust — which, for money going to the people they love, is the whole point.

What's next

An accessibility pass across the flow, clearer first-time education for new corridors, and continued tightening of the beneficiary experience. Sending money home should feel as certain as handing it over in person.