UI/UX
Design system
Visual design
Prototyping
Art direction
Brand development
Small businesses play a vital role in our communities. They form the backbone of local and national commerce and serve vital needs of their end users. Pollinates mission is to reconnect banks and small businesses through a payments platform that enables them to thrive.
Our approach needed to flexible and agile and encompass both initial merchant needs and allow for future scaling and ultimately moving towards Pollinates long term ‘White label’ strategy.
We were tasked with designing a platform that met the evolving and diverse needs of these SME’s while simultaneously creating a seamless user experience. This would form the foundation of the Tyl product.
We designed and launched the ‘Tyl’ platform with Pollinates UK based partner NatWest. This has established Tyl as a prominent payments provider in the UK market while building out the core MVP of the product.
Key to both the MVP and future iterations of the product was the need for an established design system. This needed to establish the core interaction, design and visual components of the product for the launch of ‘Tyl by NatWest’ in the UK. However critically it also needed to reflect a number of other core requirements. The most important of these was to design the system in a way which would allow it to flex, evolve and be iterated on as Pollinate engage and partner with banks in other markets.
An exhaustive list of core components was created by adopting an ‘atomic’ approach to the system. This in turn allowed the establishing of core atoms, molecules and organisms.
At the heart of the experience is the intuitive Tyl portal with the key tools to understand, manage and grow a business. Designed to be broadly self service it aimed to minimise the need for call centre contact. That meant giving merchants the means to understand their transactions and settlements, apply for finance or manage a digital loyalty program.
After the success of the initial launch of Tyl by NatWest we continued to iterate on our designs, work through the product roadmap and design new features. One of these was ‘Non-banked’ which would allow our partner bank NatWest to onboard merchants outside their immediate customer base.
One of Pollinates core goals is to provide merchants with the services and insights to manage and ultimately allow their business to flourish. As part of this feature we developed a proof of concept for on the go insights which we then tested with merchants. These were then iterated based on feedback and an MVP version was pushed live for merchants to use.
It seems like an obvious thing to say but SME's vary wildly in both the way they are set up and consequently how they are run. This could be down to preference, necessity or a bit of both. So with this in mind another core feature we have been working through is dealing with more complex business structures that go beyond a single store or settlement. This is aimed at allowing the merchant flexibility in how they set up their account.
As part of our ongoing design work we were also responsible for developing the overall Tyl brand assets and postioning. Deliverables such as custom iconography sets were developed from scratch to sit alongside other assets such as illustrations and brand photography.
The approach was to design a set of clear, identifiable and unified icons that shared a consistent style. We opted for a clean, lightweight and precise approach with outline shapes and sparing use of fills.
Additionally a whole suite of brand assets were developed to really flesh out the brand executions and create a well rounded brand. These included deliverables such as decks, legal documents, letterheads, and business cards.
With the success of Tyl by NatWest in the UK, Pollinate plan to expand and launch Tyl in other markets. This required us to focus our design approach on an adaptable design that can be tailored and customised to a specific context and brand.
