Lunar

What is Lunar?

Lunar is Scandinavia’s leading challenger bank, serving over one million users across Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. From its inception, Lunar’s mission was clear: disrupt traditional banking by offering a simpler, more personal solution to managing money. Lunar's aim is to stand apart from legacy institutions, redefining how personal and business banking could work. Breaking free from the constraints of brick-and-mortar branches, long queues, and overly complicated systems.

The vision is simple. Empower users to make their own financial decisions and bank the way they wanted, without being bogged down by confusing products or relying on financial advisors.

The Problem

As Lunar grew from an early-stage start-up to a fully licensed bank, the product had evolved to meet the demands of a rapidly expanding user base. New features and functionalities were added, and product squads were formed to meet various business objectives. However, this fast pace of growth resulted in some unintended consequences: silos began to form, and the experience became more fragmented.

What was once a simple, intuitive banking app had gradually become cluttered and harder to navigate. User feedback highlighted recurring pain points, including difficulty in finding essential features and frustrations with a disjointed experience.

Despite a solid 4.5-star rating across App Stores and TrustPilot, the qualitative feedback told a different story: users were feeling the strain of a product that had grown too complex.

"It should be simpler; after five years, I still struggle to find my way around."

"The home screen is too busy; hard to focus. Important features are buried in sub-menus."

"The app is very unintuitive. It provides a complex and unappealing interface compared with Revolut, Monzo, and Starling Bank."

This complexity was compounded by the shifting competitive landscape. No longer were we competing against local legacy banks such as Danske and Nordea, but with emerging fintechs like Revolut, Wise, and N26, which offered sleek, intuitive products. At the same time, established banks were catching up in the digital space, which meant that Lunar’s core value proposition—simplicity—was at risk. We needed to act quickly to regain our competitive edge.

Definition

To address these challenges, I assembled a cross-functional team of designers, developers, and product managers. Our goal was clear: redefine the Lunar experience from the ground up. We wanted to create an experience that was simple, intuitive, and user-centric, while also positioning Lunar to scale and meet future growth demands.

1. First, we needed to simplify and optimise the existing app experience, ensuring that we could deliver key features in a way that was easy to access and use.
2. Second, we sought to build a design system and technical platform that would not only solve current issues but also allow Lunar to continue innovating and expanding in the years to come.

With this mission in mind, we set out to refine Lunar’s value proposition—making banking easier for our users and positioning ourselves as the premier digital bank in the Nordics and beyond.

Research & Discovery

User Research

Our research began with a thorough review of the existing experience. We sent out a series of qualitative surveys to understand users' pain points, asking them specific questions about the app’s usability and the challenges they faced. We also recruited a diverse group of users, from private banking customers to business clients, to form a user panel. This panel became integral to our process, offering valuable insights throughout the redesign phase.

In addition to interviews, we conducted co-design sessions where users were asked to design their ideal banking app. We asked them to map out their daily, weekly, and monthly financial tasks, which helped us understand the frequency with which users interacted with certain features. This exercise revealed key insights:

• Frequently used features, like card details and transaction history, were buried under layers of navigation.
• Some important features were hidden in sub-menus, leading to frustration during time-sensitive tasks.
• The app was cluttered, with too many competing elements, making it hard for users to focus on what mattered most.

Market Analysis

We didn’t just focus on banks—we broadened our market analysis to include leading fintech products and apps in other industries. By analysing how other successful platforms approached user experience, we were able to benchmark Lunar’s performance and identify where we were falling short.

We looked closely at our competitors in the fintech space, including Revolut and N26, as well as established banks, and examined how they solved similar user problems. Through user feedback and testing, we also established a clear understanding of where Lunar could improve. This research formed the foundation for our next steps, allowing us to identify the key features and functionalities that would differentiate Lunar from its competitors.

Guiding Principles

With a clear understanding of the user needs and competitive landscape, we established four key principles to guide the redesign:

1. Simple

   • Focus on intuitive interactions and familiar patterns.
   • Reduce cognitive load by limiting choices and keeping content concise.

2. Focused

   • Break down complex tasks into smaller, more manageable steps.
   • Use visual cues like colour and layout to guide users towards important actions.

3. Inclusive

   • Use clear, jargon-free language to make banking accessible to all users.
   • Follow accessibility guidelines to ensure the app serves a wide range of users.

4. Delightful

   • Add moments of surprise and delight, using micro-interactions and animations.
   • Create a visually engaging experience that builds trust and joy in the product.

These principles became our North Star, ensuring that every decision we made was aligned with the goal of delivering a seamless, user-first experience.

Ideation & Prototyping

Workshops

The next phase involved running a series of workshops, each aimed at tackling a specific user need or product flow. For each sprint, we brought together a diverse group of stakeholders, including designers, product managers, developers, data analysts, and customer service teams. This ensured that we had a holistic view of the problem and that the solutions we developed would be both technically feasible and aligned with business goals.

1. Understand

   • We focused on defining the problem and aligning the team around a shared goal. By mapping the user journey and identifying key pain points, we gained a clear understanding of the challenge at hand. Expert interviews provided valuable insights, enabling us to frame the problem in a way that resonated with the team and stakeholders. This foundation ensured clarity and focus for the rest of the sprint.

2. Ideate

   • Based on our collective understanding we went wide, exploring potential solutions through collaborative workshop exercises. We reviewed How Might We’s from the previous day for inspiration before diving into individual sketching and flow mapping exercises, over multiple rounds. Each team member contributed unique perspectives, and by the end of the day, we had a diverse set of concepts ready for review. This stage helped ensure no idea was left unexplored.

3. Decide

   • We refined our focus by selecting the most promising solutions and flows for each user job. Through structured critique and dot voting, we assessed the ideas generated during ideation. Once aligned, we developed a detailed storyboard to visualise the chosen solution, setting a clear direction for prototyping. This step was crucial in aligning the team behind a single concept.

4. Prototype

   • In a smaller group, we then focused on turning our chosen ideas into a tangible prototype that could be shared across the business and tested with users. Using a variety of fidelities, we created interactive prototypes without being too detailed, allowing us to change ideas easily. The goal was speed and functionality, prioritising just enough detail for meaningful user testing.

5. Test

   • We conducted one-on-one sessions, observing how users interacted with the solution and gathering qualitative feedback. This revealed actionable insights, highlighting both strengths and areas for improvement. These findings guided our next steps, whether iterating, refining, or pivoting the concept.

We ran multiple design sprints throughout the process, all building upon each other, ensuring that we were continuously adding to the experience while staying true to our principles. We explored six distinct information architecture and core experience proposals as well as countless iterations on deeper product experiences. Each adding to the knowledge of the last, allowing us to narrow our choices and gain confidence with key stakeholders as we moved into the implementation phases.

Implementation

Agile Collaboration

We worked in agile sprints, collaborating closely with key stakeholders across the business to ensure that the design and technical implementation remained aligned. For each phase of the project, we formed dedicated teams with the necessary expertise to tackle specific aspects of the user experience.

Our design team, consisting of UX and visual designers, worked closely with iOS and Android developers to ensure that the final product was consistent across platforms. We also involved members from other squads, such as accounts and transactions, to ensure that the right knowledge was applied at the right time.

Design System

To ensure consistency across the app and streamline development, we worked with the design system team to standardise components and interactions. We implemented a new design token system, which not only improved the user experience but also allowed for more efficient development and easier updates in the future.

Rollout and Testing

1. Internal Alpha Testing

   • We launched an internal alpha version of the app to all employees, allowing them to explore the new experience early on and provide valuable feedback. This helped us identify bugs and usability issues before the broader beta release.

2. Opt-in Beta Testing

   • Once the core functionality was in place, we rolled out an opt-in beta to 50,000 users. This allowed us to gather thousands of feedback points, which we analysed using AI models to summarise key insights. The feedback we received from beta users was instrumental in refining the experience.

3. A/B Testing

   • We then moved to A/B testing, launching the new experience to a small group of new users. By comparing the new design with the old, we could track key metrics and validate the effectiveness of the changes.

4. Full Rollout

   • Once we reached significant improvements in our key metrics, we launched the updated app to all users. The rollout was accompanied by a comprehensive marketing campaign, including in-app messaging, email communications, and customer service outreach to ensure a smooth transition and uptake.

Conclusion

This project marked a transformative chapter for Lunar, redefining how we approached user experience while addressing the challenges of rapid growth and market competition. By placing our users at the heart of the process and aligning cross-functional teams around shared goals, we successfully delivered an experience that not only met but exceeded expectations.

Most importantly, this project reconnected Lunar to its original vision: empowering users to bank their way. Through simplicity, focus, and delight, we’ve set a new benchmark for what a challenger bank can achieve—reaffirming Lunar’s position as the go-to banking experience in the Nordics, and laying the groundwork for future success on a global stage.