I led a team of five designers to unify Verve's six independently-built digital products under a single visual identity system, using the Aesthetic Usability Effect as a strategic framework to solve a measurable trust deficit across the entire product ecosystem.
Six products. No shared design language. A brand that users couldn't consistently recognise. The work covered a full discovery and audit phase, root cause analysis, identity definition, a ground-up design system, and parallel redesigns of all six products from the consumer website to the internal agent banking platform.
Image — Hero visual / before-after brand reveal
Recommended: 1600 × 900px · PNG or WebP
Verve is Interswitch Group's flagship payment card, Africa's most widely used domestic card with over 100 million active cardholders. Since launch, Verve had grown from a single payment card into a multi-product digital ecosystem.
But unlike the card itself which had a singular, clear purpose, the digital products around it had grown independently, shaped by different teams, different timelines, and different constraints. When features couldn't fit into existing products, new ones were created instead. The result was six products that worked, but didn't belong together.
Image — 6 products before unification
Side-by-side screenshots showing visual fragmentation · 2400 × 1000px
Before defining any design direction, I needed to establish a quantified baseline. I began with a full product audit across all six digital products, supplemented by behavioural data from Microsoft Clarity, user interviews with 18 participants across consumer, merchant, and agent segments, and an internal survey of the engineering and customer support teams.
"I thought the merchant portal and the Verve website were two different companies. I only realised they were both Verve when I saw the card logo in the corner."
— Merchant interview participant, Lagos. Verve POS user, 2+ years.
Research synthesis artifacts
Image — User persona
Primary persona created from research data
After synthesising data from the audit, Clarity analysis, user interviews, and stakeholder sessions, I ran a structured root cause analysis to move from symptoms to structural cause. The data pointed at a surface-level problem, Poor user experience but there was something deeper underneath.
Session recordings and interview data indicated that users weren't confused by individual features, they were confused by the product landscape itself. Every product looked and felt like it came from a different company. The fragmentation wasn't a feature problem. It was a systemic design identity failure.
The fix wasn't cosmetic it required building a design system from scratch and applying it across every product simultaneously, under a single coordinated design direction.
With the root cause identified, I anchored the strategy in the Aesthetic Usability Effect the well-documented principle that users perceive more aesthetically pleasing interfaces as easier to use and more trustworthy, even before interacting with them. First described by Kurosu and Kashimura (1995).
In fintech, user trust is the primary product. The research showed clearly that visual quality was directly influencing how users perceived reliability. Treating visual quality as a trust infrastructure decision not a cosmetic one was what allowed me to align stakeholders on investing time in design system and identity work before any screens were redesigned.
"Users perceive more aesthetically pleasing designs as easier to use even before they've completed a single interaction with them."
— Kurosu, M. & Kashimura, K. (1995). Apparent Usability vs. Inherent Usability. CHI '95 Conference Companion.I mapped the user's journey through Verve's ecosystem into four stages, and defined a design strategy for each that would leverage the Aesthetic Usability Effect at every touchpoint.
After synthesising the research and discovery phase, I extracted five design principles — shared with, critiqued by, and agreed upon by the full design team and key stakeholders before a single pixel of the new identity was created.
As design lead, I managed the end-to-end design process from planning to delivery: establishing a systematic design approach, laying high-level design foundations, setting guidelines, reviewing work, managing stakeholders, and designing hands-on across all six products.
Image — Design system / token architecture
Figma token library, primitive to component · 1600 × 900px
The identity work started with the core questions: what does Verve stand for visually, and how do we express that in a way that's distinctly African, distinctly fintech, and scalable across six different product contexts?
The resulting system established a three-tier token architecture — Primitives, Semantic, and Component tokens — 89 variables across five collections, a defined type scale, effect styles, and a unified colour palette that could flex across both consumer-facing and internal tooling contexts without losing brand coherence.
Image — Colour system
Primitive palette + semantic token mapping
Image — Typography scale
Type system — display to caption
Image — Component library overview
Button, Card, Badge, Toast, Accordion, Avatar · 1600 × 900px
Each of the five designers owned a product workstream. My role was to design the consumer website and mobile app directly, set the visual standard for all workstreams, run weekly design crits, and make calls when there was tension between local product logic and the shared system.
The non-negotiables: every product used the same token library, the same component set, and the same spacing scale. Local decisions within that framework were permitted; local overrides of the foundational layer were not.
Image — verveafrica.com redesign
Homepage · desktop + mobile · 1600 × 900px
Image — Merchant portal
Dashboard + transaction view
Image — Verve mobile app redesign
Key screens — home, payments, card management · 1600 × 900px
The 6-month project delivered a fully unified Verve ecosystem for the first time since the brand's inception. All six products launched with a shared visual identity, a single token-based design system, and consistent component usage across every touchpoint.
The 73% brand confusion rate among merchant users — the problem that had catalysed the project — was eliminated as a structural issue. Users could now recognise every Verve product as part of the same family from the first screen, before completing a single task.
The 4.2× support ticket ratio from navigation confusion dropped significantly in the post-launch monitoring period, as the consistent navigation structure and predictable UI patterns reduced the incidence of UI-driven errors.
"This is the first time I've looked at our merchant portal and the website and thought — yes, that's the same company."
— Internal stakeholder review, Interswitch Group, 2024.
Image — Before & after comparison
Any product — old vs new side by side · 1600 × 900px
