Updraft
50 screens in one week for an app with 1M+ members.
50 screens in a week, straight from a Figma design system, for an app with over a million members
- Client
- Updraft · UK
- App
- Expo SDK 54 · iOS · Android, plus web
- Scale
- 1M+ members, FCA-regulated
- Status
- Past work
Context
Updraft helps people in the UK pay off credit card debt by bringing their balances into one payment, alongside a free credit report, loans, banking insights and bill tools. It's authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority and, by Updraft's own figures, has over a million members.
The problem
The app covers a lot of ground: credit report, loans, credit cards, banking, bills, overdraft, insights and more, each with its own flows. Every screen had to match Echo, Updraft's design system in Figma, exactly, on phones and tablets, and the web app had to use the same design system. Copying colours and spacing out of Figma by hand is slow, and it drifts.
What I built
New screens built from the Figma designs through the pipeline: design to Expo screens, wired to the API and tested feature by feature.
Echo lands in the codebase as a typed tokens package: brand and theme colours in light and dark, and spacing and type for phone, tablet and desktop.
The Expo app reads tokens through one theme hook, scaled to each screen size. The web app gets the same tokens compiled to Tailwind.
Expo Router with a folder per feature area, a shared UI kit, and server data through TanStack Query, so new screens slot in without rework.
The app runs with Sentry for crashes, Heap, Firebase Analytics and AppsFlyer for analytics, Intercom for support, feature flags, and Sanity for content.
How quality is enforced
No hex colour or magic spacing number in app code. Everything comes from the design system through the theme.
Token files exported from Figma are never edited by hand, so the next design update can't overwrite a fix.
A snapshot test fails if the web's compiled theme stops matching the tokens.
Result
50 screens in one week, built to Updraft's Figma design system, in an app used by over a million members.
Stack
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