Remitly Home

Year

2025–2026

Type

Product Design

Team

Product, Engineering, Research, Design Systems

Problem

We identified three risks: teams building independently had fragmented the experience into competing sections rather than a coherent whole; content cards had become a catch-all that drove 5–10% CTR and 0.01% transfer starts; and customers had built such strong habits around placement that moving the Wallet widget one position dropped transfers by 3.12%.

My Role

I was the sole designer on this project, partnering directly with my PM on strategy and leading all research. I owned the framework architecture and the navigation redesign, and drove alignment across Growth, Business, Wallet, Membership, and Marketing - all of whom had dependencies on where this was going. I reported to my director and the VP of Product, presenting at key decision points rather than recurring status updates.

The Framework

Home needed three things to be true: it had to prioritize action over information, organize around customer intent rather than org structure, and stay stable enough that customers could build habits around it. That last one is the constraint most teams underestimate. Personalization belongs inside sections - in what content appears and how it's ranked - not in reordering the sections themselves. Reordering sections with ML predictions is tempting, but it risks breaking habits that 9.3 million customers rely on.

Four fixed utility sections anchor every customer's experience: critical actions, shortcuts, the FX widget, and balance. Fixed because customers build habits around placement -- and habits are load-bearing. These sections don't move, don't personalize, don't get reordered by an algorithm. Stability is the feature.

Merchandising

Three dynamic sections handle everything else: engagement tasks, expansion actions, and announcements. This is where new products enter. They get surfaced here, tested for adoption, and if they earn a place in customers' habits, they graduate into utility. The product can grow without the Home screen becoming incoherent.

Navigation

We started by fixing how navigation behaved -- keeping flows local rather than routing customers out to a different root. Once the behavior was consistent, the structural redundancy became obvious: the Wallet tab was prominent but the Home widget drove more transfers; Explore was abandoned once its content moved to Home. The tabs weren't doing anything the Home screen wasn't doing better. So we simplified to three destinations -- Home, Send, Activity -- built around what the product actually is right now, with everything else accessible through Home. The FAB is where it goes next: one contextual action surface that scales as the product adds complexity.

Impact