Bold, accessible colours for Wise’s global rebrand
Project overview:
Designing a 100% accessible colour palette for a global Fintech
Wise is an international account used by 16 million people. As part of a global rebrand I overhauled our foundational colour library and designed a new token set to be used everywhere in product.
The rebrand increased brand awareness, achieving a 35% uplift in multi-product adoption. Colour pairings on all themes passed both WCAG and APCA contrast requirements.
The problem:
Our existing colours lacked brand impact and accessible contrast
The product looked dated and lacked visual impact.
Most Fintech brands were blue; Wise was lost in a sea of sameness.
Key colours failed basic contrast tests.
The users:
Designing for end users, internal teams, and the design community
Wise end users — managing money across borders.
Internal designers and engineers — using the system to build the product.
The external design community — to excite, inspire, and recruit.
My role:
Lead product designer for the colour system rebrand
The team:
Design: 1 x work-stream lead & product designer (me), 1 x brand designer
Development: 1 x Android, 2 x iOS, 4 x web engineers
Visual direction: Ragged Edge
Collaboration: 4 other work-streams, design ops, leadership, brand, and 70+ product teams
Discovery and scoping:
Auditing creative concepts against existing colours to create a roadmap
Ragged Edge set the visual direction and shared high-level concepts. The challenge was to translate these to the real product and create a scaleable colour system. I audited the concepts against existing libraries and screens to map out the work, and found that we needed to redesign the entire colour library.
Design explorations:
Balancing hierarchy, accessibility, and brand distinctiveness
I paired with Brand Designer, Caio Orio, on the design phase. First, we defined content colours that made bright green buttons pop. Neutrals with a hint of green worked better than overly green colours.
After that, we defined colours for surfaces, borders, interactivity, theming, and more. We then stress-tested colours in our component library, top trafficked screens, and code.
Accessibility testing:
Advanced contrast tests and colourblindness simulations
Our strategy was to test, iterate, repeat until every colour pairing on every theme excelled WCAG and APCA requirements. We significantly increased contrast scores, and ran colourblindness simulations too.
To find out more, read my full case study on colour accessibility.
Usability testing:
Increasing task completion times with better contrast in key flows
A key business requirement was that the visual changes must not negatively impact the usability of our core money transfer product.
So I A/B tested the old vs new colours in prototypes of key moments and components. Results showed that better colour contrast ratios increased task completion times for all participants.
We also measured conversion rates post-launch to be sure there was no negative impact.
The build:
Specs, QA, and supporting teams adopt new styles
I created a list of old vs new tokens and a spec for how to remap the tokens within components. I also ran colour QA on all platforms and supported implementation across the org.
Results:
The rebrand increased brand awareness resulting in a 35% increase in multi-product adoption for the Wise account
We achieved an overall QX score of 83.07%, with scores for appearance, trust, loyalty, and usability all increasing.
We launched an 100% accessible palette across multiple colour themes
There was no negative impact on conversion for our core send money product
The design system was globally adopted across all Wise platforms and experiences
My case study got over 1 million hits and was shared by Smashing Magazine founder Vitaly Freidman
Awards and recognition
We won Best Adoption at the Zeroheight Design System Awards 2023 for enabling all Wise teams to adopt the rebrand styles.
We were highly commended in the categories for best App Design, Rebrand, and In-house team at the Design Week 2023 Awards.
We were shortlisted for the D&AD category for branding design systems.
The rebrand was named Armin Vit at Brand New’s Best Project of 2023
