Nestor Ruiz
All work
The redesigned NS&I app at its most iconic — Premium Bonds onboarding and the monthly prize draw, in NS&I’s purple, polished and cross-device.

PRODUCT · RESEARCH · 2022

NS&I

14 → 4
Minutes to open an account
+62%
Increase in completed sign-ups
1st
Year mobile overtook web for new accounts
  • NS&I usability testing, 2022.
  • NS&I, 2022.
  • NS&I, 2022.

Premium Bonds are the UK’s most-held savings product — and, for a long time, one of the hardest to open on a phone. The work was to modernise a national institution quietly: keep the trust a Treasury-backed product carries, lose the friction a generation raised on banking apps won’t forgive.

  • Product strategy
  • User research
  • UX design
  • UI / visual design
  • Service design
  • Accessibility
  • Prototyping

01Brief

Around one in three people in the UK holds Premium Bonds. That scale is also a weight: NS&I is Treasury-backed, decades-trusted, and any change is felt by millions of people who are not, by and large, early adopters. The product had been built for the post office and the desktop, and it showed — opening an account on a phone meant a long, form-heavy slog that many people simply abandoned. The brief was delicate: modernise without startling. Keep every ounce of the institutional trust, strip out the friction a generation that opens a bank account before it ever walks into a bank has no patience for.

The old account-opening flow — a long desktop-era form ported onto a small screen.
Where people dropped out, mapped step by step across the existing journey.
Research and audit, 2021.

02Approach enfoque

The opening journey rebuilt mobile-first — fewer steps, each one doing less.

The first principle

Trust isn’t built by looking serious; it’s built by never making someone feel lost. The old flow mistook length for rigour — it asked everything up front because the form had always asked everything up front. We rebuilt the account opening mobile-first, cutting it to the few decisions that genuinely needed making and deferring the rest. Every screen was given one job. The institutional weight stayed in the tone and the clarity, not in the number of fields — a Treasury product can feel calm and still feel safe.

The redesigned onboarding — opening an account in minutes, not a sitting.

Trust isn’t built by looking serious. It’s built by never making someone feel lost.

Research with older and less confident users, shaping language and pace.

Designed with the cautious

The people most likely to abandon weren’t careless; they were careful. A lot of Premium Bonds holders are older, or simply wary of getting money decisions wrong, and they read every word. So the research leaned toward them: testing language, pace and reassurance with the cautious rather than the confident. What helped them — plain words, a clear sense of where you are and what happens next, no surprises about money — turned out to help everyone. Accessibility wasn’t a final pass; it set the defaults.

The monthly prize draw, made a moment to return for rather than a back-office event.
Holdings and prize history, legible at a glance.
The working parts, 2021–2022.

03Work obra

The NS&I app across iOS, Android and web — polished, final imagery.
Open an account — the rebuilt mobile-first flow, end to end.
Top up and manage holdings without leaving the app.
Opening and managing, in minutes.
The monthly draw as a reason to come back — checking for a win on the phone.

The draw as a habit

Premium Bonds have something most savings products don’t: a monthly moment of suspense. The old experience buried it. We made the prize draw a reason to open the app — a clear, quietly exciting check each month for whether your numbers came up — without ever tipping into the manipulative patterns of a gambling product. It’s a savings account that happens to be fun to check, and keeping that line honest was part of the design, not an afterthought.

A holder checking the monthly draw result — final imagery.
One coherent experience across native apps and web, holding the same standard.

One standard, three surfaces

A national product can’t be modern on the phone and stranded on the web. The redesign ran across native iOS, Android and web so the experience held the same standard wherever someone met it — the same clarity opening an account, the same calm managing holdings, the same draw moment. The year it shipped, mobile overtook the web for new accounts for the first time: not because anyone was pushed there, but because, finally, it was the easier place to be.

04Outcome resultado

A national institution got quietly easier to use. Opening Premium Bonds dropped from around fourteen minutes to four, completed sign-ups rose by well over half, and for the first time more people opened accounts on their phones than on the web — all without spending a drop of the trust the product runs on. The lesson held across everything after: modernising something millions rely on is less about boldness than about removing, carefully, every reason to give up.

They made it feel modern without making it feel risky — which, for us, was the whole job.

— NS&I Product Owner, 2022
Client
NS&I (National Savings and Investments)
Years
2021–2022
Role
Senior Product Designer
Platforms
iOS · Android · Web
Scope
Product strategy · User research · UX · UI · Service design · Accessibility · Prototyping
Product
Premium Bonds account opening & app