A credit card app, designed solo
This is a React Native app I designed solo for a credit card issuer: a financial product with real cards and real money. The scope ran registration, KYC identity checks, SCA strong authentication, card activation, PIN management, locking, stolen or lost reporting and account management, in both a complete dark theme and a complete light theme. Because the product is unreleased and financially sensitive, every screenshot here is ultra low resolution and fully blurred, keeping only the shape of the layouts, and no prototype links are shared. The article leans on narrative instead: the requirements, the constraints, and what got solved.
KYC, SCA and card activation
Card issuing has a compliance order: KYC proves the person, SCA binds the device, and only then does activation open. KYC wants ID documents and proof of address such as utility bills, with liveness detection in some scenarios. Third party components run those checks; the UX owns everything around the component: state clearly what to prepare before entering, state clearly what happened after leaving, and above all give the seconds while verification runs a real waiting state, so the system reads as working, not frozen. The OTP pop ups follow the same logic: default, error and filled states all designed, with error copy saying how many retries remain and when a resend unlocks.
Dark and light, twice the states
The client wanted dark and light themes shipping together. That is not a color inversion: status colors need re-tuned contrast on dark, card faces need their depth on both backgrounds, and error red stings differently on black. My approach locked the structure first (one flow set, one component set, one state set), then laid a visual layer per theme, maintained side by side in Figma. What designing an entire financial app alone teaches: every decision must hold up to compliance, engineering and business at once, and persuasion matters more than screen count.
