Case Study
Designing a digital gold investment app where users don't just save gold — they wear it.
Fintech · Digital Gold
Mobile App + Admin Panel
Overview
Two jewellery shop owners — non-technical founders — hired me as a freelance designer to build a digital gold investment platform from scratch. No existing product, no prior design. Just a business idea and a market gap.
The end users are millennial investors aged 25–45 who understand gold as a cultural and financial asset but can't afford to buy in bulk. The app lets them invest as little as ₹100 per day, week, or month — and then redeem that accumulated gold as actual jewellery they can wear. Not sell. Wear.
The Problem
There was no existing product to redesign. So I started with competitor analysis — studying how Jar and Gullak handle digital gold — and found one critical gap that neither of them had solved.
Competitors studied
Jar · Gullak — both handle digital gold savings. Neither solved what I found below.
Jewellery conversion doesn't exist anywhere
Every competitor lets you save gold digitally. None let you redeem it as jewellery using your balance — without selling first. The entire conversion flow had to be invented.
Users couldn't understand what they'd actually pay
If a user has 3.2g and a ring costs 2.8g — how much is that in rupees? What are the charges? What's left after? No app showed this clearly at the moment of purchase.
KYC friction kills first-time users
Asking for Aadhaar and PAN before the user has seen what the app does is a dead end. Most users drop off before they invest a single rupee.
Founders had no visibility into operations
The two non-technical founders needed to manage orders, inventory, and user activity — but had no operational interface designed for non-technical people.
"I have 3 grams of gold in this app. I want a ring, but it uses 2.8 grams. How do I buy it without selling my gold first?"
— The user problem that no competitor had solved
My Role
Solo from day one. Every screen, every flow, both the consumer app and the admin panel — all mine. The founders approved each screen, which meant I had to explain and defend decisions clearly to non-technical clients.
🎨
Onboarding, KYC, home dashboard (Gold & Silver tabs), jewellery browse, cart with digital gold checkout, investment flows.
Solo
⚙️
Operations dashboard for two non-technical founders. Order management, user activity, inventory, and reporting — simplified for daily use without technical knowledge.
Solo
🗺️
Colour tokens, typography, component library, gold/silver-themed visual language. Nothing existed before this project started.
Solo
🔍
Studied Jar and Gullak to map the market gap before designing a single screen.
Solo
💻
Handled by the development team.
Dev team
The Problem
1
Architecture
Gold and Silver as tabs, not separate screens.
On the home screen, the user needed access to both Gold and Silver investments. The question was whether to treat them as separate destination screens or as tabs on a single dashboard. Tabs keep the user anchored to one home — they can see both assets, switch instantly, and always know where their money is. Two separate screens would have fragmented the experience and hidden the relationship between the two investments.
❌ Two separate screens
→
✔ Tabs on one dashboard
2
Onboarding flow
KYC after onboarding — not before.
The standard approach in fintech is to complete KYC before any action. But a new user landing on a gold investment app has no emotional investment yet — asking for Aadhaar and PAN at the door causes immediate drop-off. The decision was to let the user explore the full product first. They see live gold prices, browse jewellery, understand the conversion flow — and then KYC is triggered only when they want to buy or invest. By that point, they already want to be there.
❌ KYC before entry
→
✔ Explore first · KYC at purchase intent
3
Most impactful UX decision
The "Use Your Digital Gold" toggle — solving the problem no competitor had.
This is the decision the entire product was built around. When a user wants to buy jewellery, they shouldn't have to sell their gold first, calculate the shortfall, then buy. That's three friction points — and it's exactly what Jar and Gullak force you to do.
The solution: a single toggle in the cart called "Use Your Digital Gold." When switched on, the cart instantly shows:
· How many grams will be used (2.8g)
· The equivalent rupee value (≈₹20,580)
· The making charges in rupees and as a percentage (₹267 · 1.3%)
· GST clearly separated (₹617 · 3%)
· The total as a hybrid — grams + rupees (2.8g + ₹884)
· And most importantly: how much gold remains in the portfolio (0.4g = ₹2,936)
The user never has to do the maths.
Cart screen — "Use Your Digital Gold" toggle with gram and rupee breakdown
❌ Sell gold → get cash → buy jewellery
→
4
Operations
Admin panel designed for non-technical founders — not for developers.
The two clients are jewellery shop owners. They understand inventory, orders, and customer relationships — but not dashboards full of data tables and toggles. The admin panel was designed around their daily questions, not around what was technically easy to build: How many orders came in today? Which ones are pending? What is the current gold price affecting the portfolio value? The interface answers these questions without requiring the founders to learn a tool.
❌ Data-first admin dashboard
→
✔ Task-first · daily questions answered at a glance
GoldSaving - Digital Gold & Jewellery
Case study · Freelance UI/UX Design · Consumer App + Admin Panel