It started with the idea of redesigning the iOS navigation. We wanted to move from a hamburger menu to a tab bar, so we could make the navigation even more simple.

From a design perspective, the question was how to reduce all the features of a fully fledged banking app, including new ones coming upon our roadmap, down to five icons. But then, we realised, if Facebook could do it, so could we!

While this project represented a certain amount of challenges, it was nothing compared to what awaited us on the Android version.

Up to this point, we’d kept the Number26 app similar on both Apple and Android. The main drivers behind this decision was that we wanted to make sure that features were identical on both phones. And there was also the element that Number26 had to release the new app quickly.

Now, we had a question: how should we re-design the navigation on Android devices?

Luckily, our Android team had recently grown. And even if the Android app always had a one-to-one feature parity with iOS, the Android team felt the experience of 50% of our users could be improved if we used Material Design Language, a new approach to design created by Google. They wanted to give the full Material Design experience to Android users.

The main benefit we saw on our side was that using Material Design would help us move faster. As we were spending most of our time designing new important features like Cash26, the fact Material Design has such detailed spec would help us save time and focus on UX questions about how the main features and flows of the app fit Android’s native conventions.

As a plus, we designers love new challenges, and playing with this new design language felt like a lot of fun. We spent a day reading the entire specs of Material design as a team. We fanned out to find the best new apps using the Material design language, so we could see it in action.

We got really excited about the possibilities. But the process of mastering this new design language wasn’t without its hiccups.

Quick Tests with the Target Audience

Now that we had a framework for the new navigation, we start looking for various design patterns in Material design.

After downloading countless apps, we finally found an app that really seemed to get the navigation right and solved a problem similar to the one we had. We could just adjust it to our needs, and we’d found a great option for the navigation on Android devices.

So, we quickly created a prototype in InVision to show to the Android development team for feedback.

Their first reaction was to start laughing!

They worried that we’d completely misunderstood the Material Design principles. While it is true we took them more as guidelines rather than hard rules, we felt that we at least had an example of one major app using the pattern. They admitted it was true but unfortunately, the app we based our approach on was a terrible example in the Android world. They’d always felt that it was counter intuitive.

That was something we couldn’t see when playing around with Android phones for 2 days. And that is how we learned that, regardless of how many apps we looked at or how many best practices articles we read, nothing would replace the experience of being a daily user.

That’s why we’ve decided on the design team to use Android phones every single day, even if our personal phones were designed in Cupertino!

All That Floats Is Not Gold (on iOS)

We felt in love with the floating action button that typical from Material Design. From a user experience point of view, they let us differentiate very clearly between the two user states of mind about their money: when they want to know more about what’s happening with their money versus when they want to do something with their money.

In any case, everybody found this big green button very swish, and we started thinking that we could perhaps do something similar on the iOS version.

To make sure we were not going to far, we decided to ask around what people thought about it. We focus on a testing culture. While we also do more formal user tests, we also believe in quick, casual user tests.

We’ll mock up a prototype feature in InVision, and then we’ll walk around the office getting people to use the prototype. You’ll learn a lot from these quick tests, and what we learnt was that iOS users really didn’t know what the button was for.

The concept was too far from what users were used to on iPhones. Therefore, we reverted to an action button that is centered on the menu bar, while visually separating the information and action elements.

How We’re Designing Now

At Number26 we have one design team working on both the Android and iOS apps, because we want to keep parity between features on both devices. At the same, we’re working hard to make sure that experience on both devices feels native, yet uniquely Number26.

This means that we are striving to get to the core of new features, regardless of whether they’re on iOS or Android, and then we think about how they’ll play out on both platforms.

We hope you enjoy the new Material-inspired Number26 app. Google Play just listed Number26’s Android app as one of the best apps of 2015 in Germany. And if you want to join us in shaping the future of banking, there are plenty of vacant positions on the design team right now!