SlideThe first instant cash back app

The problem

Cash back has always carried a delay. Payouts settle through merchant reconciliation, so the money lands weeks after checkout, cut loose from the purchase that earned it and from any decision to shop again. The reward arrives too late to do what a reward is for. The whole category accepted this. The delay comes from how the money actually moves, so it read as a fixed cost of the business rather than something a product team could design around.

The opportunity

Gift cards move differently. Their value transfers at the moment of purchase instead of settling downstream, so cash back could be paid out immediately. Not faster. Immediately. Nobody else was building on this, which made Slide's premise genuinely new.

The design problem

A novel financial mechanic is only an advantage if people get it right away. Instant cash back had to feel obvious rather than clever, and that set the mandate for the whole product: build a cash back app simple enough that an unfamiliar mechanism feels effortless, on a tight timeline with almost no resources. To move fast we brought in a two-person agency known for app development. Over an intensive two months, the Slide team and I worked alongside them on wireframes, user tests, and branding concepts. That sprint gave us the foundational flow. It also made clear what was left: finalizing MLP features, defining the brand and launch plan, and building the rest of the app, which is the work that decided what Slide actually felt like to use.

With the framework in place and simplicity as the constraint, I ran a competitive analysis across cash back, discount, and financial apps to find what made the best ones feel effortless. Four principles came out of it, and they became the rules the design system was built on.

Establishing the visual direction

I built several concept boards. That meant researching not just products in our space but current and emerging trends in UI, color, illustration, and visual design, because the branding had to scale past launch into every marketing asset that followed. Working with my product manager and the executive team, we aligned on a simple, clean, impactful direction.

Building the system

Then I built the design system, which was as much a communication tool between me and the developers as a design artifact. It covered logos, typography, color, and the core UI: buttons, controls, lists, icons, alerts, and more. That system is what made the post-launch roadmap possible. Every feature after MVP was assembled from parts that already existed and already agreed with each other.

Slide launched with those four principles made concrete. One accent color carrying emphasis. Custom illustration doing the explaining that dense copy would otherwise do. A single typeface setting hierarchy. A component library making every screen feel like part of the same product.

For the team, the deliverable was equally the system underneath it. A shared vocabulary of logos, type, color, and components that let a very small group ship a consumer financial product on a compressed timeline, and keep shipping after.