Amazon Flex Debit
The worlds biggest retailer moves into the debit space
Adapting to change
In 2019 Green Dot built a new platform for all their banking services under my direction with the intent of creating a white label banking platform that would initially launch as GoBank Rewards. With major changes to the executive team at the end of 2019, that project was put on hold but the company was interested in leveraging the work that was completed to some profitable end. At the same time the Amazon Flex Debit Card project was signed and underway. I proposed reshaping the app for Amazon Flex.
One of my first steps in this process was to become a Flex driver myself. After driving a few shifts and understanding the driver’s experience using the Flex app, I had first-hand knowledge of the norms and expectations established by Amazon and could better map that experience onto the banking app we were building. We tested our early prototypes on actual devices at one of the Flex drivers’ centers in West Los Angeles to get actual drivers opinions on what we were planning to build.
Shown here a the dark mode version of the layout.
White label flexibility
Applying Amazon’s brand to the white label app was made simple by the “themable” interface architecture that allowed us to swap out features, colors, fonts, logos & other graphics without making changes to the underlying code. Designing for this flexibility not only involved a lot of ingenuity during the design process but also meant working closely with dev to make sure that the proper structures & assets relationships were properly implemented.
Shown here is another version we pitched to Walmart demonstrating the flexibility of the white label architecture. You’ll see additional UI in this Walmart version that we built to be configurable for each partner.
The final product
Within 3 months we re-skinned the GoBank Rewards app, updated the IA, changed the product configuration and provided guidance to dev to begin building the new Amazon Flex app (iOS / Android). It launched successfully in late 2020. The designer I managed on the GoBank Rewards project all throughout 2019 became the UX lead on the Amazon Flex Debit product. Pretty proud of that. He was pretty green when he started with Green Dot.
This was also the pilot project for our team’s transition from Sketch to Figma. I was the first one at our company to give this new app a trial on a live project and soon became the acknowledged authority on its capabilities. I helped the team transition from Sketch to Figma with a series of training sessions for both local and remote team members.