Project Overview
You can't say "buy", "sell", or "invest". Now design an app for doing exactly those things with gold.That was the starting point, and it was one of three layers of complexity that shaped every decision.
Regulatory constraints. The words users naturally reach for, buy, sell, invest, were ruled out by regulators. Every transaction runs through GoldNow Points, an in-app currency that is neither ringgit nor physical gold. Users think in ringgit and in gold weight; Points fit neither mental model. So every label, every line of copy, and every flow had to be built around language that was compliant and still comprehensible.
A live, financially sensitive system. Gold prices refresh every five seconds, and the market closes entirely at night, disabling three of the four primary user actions. Volatility and unavailability aren't edge cases here, they're the daily reality of the product. Designing for a system that moves constantly and goes offline regularly needs a different approach to states, feedback, and user confidence.
A bigger ecosystem than the brief suggested. Beneath the consumer app sat an external gold-partner integration, an admin system for Tomei's operational staff, and a digital-to-physical redemption flow. A decision in one layer had consequences in the others, so nothing could be designed in isolation.
My Contributions
I was the main designer during the early stages of the Tomei GoldNow mobile app, helping shape the product from its initial concepts through to launch.
My work covered UX flows, information architecture, interaction design, UI design and prototyping, with a focus on making a complex gold-based financial experience simple and approachable for users.
A big part of the challenge was translating complex product and regulatory requirements into an experience that users could easily understand. I worked through the different flows around GoldNow Points, gold pricing, transactions and redemption, while designing clear interfaces and feedback states for a product where prices change constantly and certain actions become unavailable when the market closes.
I also established reusable components and design patterns to keep the experience consistent as the product evolved. Throughout the project, I worked closely with product managers, developers and stakeholders, iterating on the designs based on feedback, technical constraints and changing requirements.I eventually handed the product over to another designer who continued the work through later stages.
One of the most rewarding parts of the project was seeing the experience I helped shape in its early stages eventually become a live product on the App Store.
