Overview

At Equals Money, I led the end to end redesign of our filtering and views system, a feature used daily by finance teams to track and report spending across multiple currencies.

The existing experience was cluttered, hidden behind icons, and painfully slow to use. For teams handling thousands of transactions, this was blocking them from doing their jobs efficiently. As we grew into white label products, this inconsistency and complexity became a scaling issue.

Over six months, I took the project from initial discovery through design, testing, and delivery. The result was a complete rework of filtering that is now faster, more visible, and scalable across multiple brands.

The Challenge

Equals Money helps businesses manage spend through cards, accounts, and transfers. As we expanded into white label partnerships, it became clear that one core feature, filtering, was not keeping up.

Filters were buried behind a settings style icon that most users missed. There was no way to save views, no real time updates, and reports often needed multiple attempts to get right. Users could not filter by specific cards or exclude irrelevant data, and on mobile it was almost unusable.

For finance managers reconciling transactions every day, these inefficiencies meant hours lost. And for our growing white label client base, the inconsistencies were starting to damage trust in the product.

The challenge was simple but critical:

Design a visible, intuitive, and scalable filtering experience that saves users time and strengthens our platform for future growth.

Discovery and Research

I started with a research phase that combined interviews, heatmaps, and behavioural data to get a full picture of what was going wrong.

• Ten user interviews with finance and operations teams surfaced consistent pain points: hidden filters, slow updates, and a lack of saved states.

• Analysed hundreds of Hotjar recordings and heatmaps, revealing repetitive clicking and hesitation around the filter icon.

• Partnered with customer support to review past tickets, confirming that filter related issues were among the top complaints.

Three core themes came out of the synthesis:

1. Hard to find: Filtering was hidden and unclear.

2. Cumbersome: Interactions required too many steps and too much guesswork.

3. Not reusable: Users could not save or recall preferred views.

One finance manager summed it up perfectly:

“We just want to set a few filters, save the view, and come back to it later without rebuilding it each time.”

Mobile users had it worse. Limited space meant constant scrolling and repeated actions, leading to frustration and errors.

Defining the Problem

From the research, I defined a focused problem statement:

Finance teams were wasting valuable time navigating a hidden, confusing filtering system that lacked immediate feedback and reusability, directly impacting productivity and user trust.

I mapped the end to end user journey from login to report export, highlighting exactly where filtering broke down. This exercise made it clear that the issue was not just UI, it was structural. Filtering needed to become a consistent, always visible layer across the product, not a buried feature.

Design Goals

I set three clear design goals to guide the project:

1. Make filtering visible and obvious.

2. Provide real time feedback to reduce friction.

3. Allow users to save, switch, and reuse custom views.

The solution also needed to support white label scalability, meaning the entire system from colour tokens to spacing had to adapt easily across branded environments.

Exploration and Iteration

I started sketching potential directions and built low fidelity wireframes to test concepts early.

Initial tests quickly surfaced issues:

• Users did not realise filters were applied until after refreshing.

• They struggled to edit or remove individual filters.

• On mobile, the filters took up too much space and felt disjointed from the content below.

Through rapid iteration, I landed on a pattern that worked:

• A persistent filter bar on desktop for quick visibility.

• A collapsible filter drawer on mobile for simplicity.

• Inline indicators showing active filters and real time updates.

Each iteration went through informal testing rounds with internal users and beta clients. The feedback loop was tight, test, fix, retest, until the interaction felt natural and immediate.

Design System Improvements

To make this redesign scalable, I also took the opportunity to clean up our design system.

I reduced more than 1,500 fragmented components to 780 structured ones, created specific component variants for filters and dropdowns, and standardised colour tokens to improve accessibility and white label adaptability.

This system work not only supported the new filtering experience but also sped up design and development for future features.

The Final Design

The final experience delivered on every goal:

• Always visible filters placed consistently across pages.

• Real time updates, users see filtered results instantly without reloading.

• Saved views with an intuitive tab system, letting users switch between report setups in one click.

• Responsive filtering panel for mobile users that expands and collapses smoothly.

This was a complete transformation, from a hidden, frustrating tool to a core part of the workflow that now feels instant and reliable.

Engineering and Delivery

As the sole designer, I handled the full handoff process, creating detailed Figma prototypes, defining interaction specs, and working closely with engineers during implementation.

I joined weekly development standups, reviewed staging builds, and stress tested edge cases myself to make sure filtering performed smoothly on all devices. That close collaboration helped cut delivery time by around 30 percent and ensured the final build matched design intent exactly.

Results and Impact

The redesigned filtering and views system launched successfully across all clients, and the results were clear:

• 94 percent reduction in filter related support tickets within eight weeks.

• 45 percent faster time to generate filtered reports.

• 62 percent increase in saved view usage.

User feedback was consistently positive:

“This filtering update will save us so much time. Being able to quickly switch views and easily apply filters is a real game changer.” — Enterprise Client

Key Learnings

• Good research saves time. The early interviews and analytics uncovered issues that would not have surfaced from guesswork.

• Design systems are force multipliers. Cleaning up the components sped up everything that followed.

• Iteration wins. Testing small changes frequently was more valuable than any big reveal.

• Ownership matters. Being the only designer meant wearing multiple hats, researcher, designer, and product lead, but it also gave me complete visibility and accountability for every decision.

Conclusion

The filtering and views redesign transformed a weak point in the product into one of its strongest features. It is faster, smarter, and scalable across all our white label clients, a clear example of how good UX can simplify complexity.

For me, this project is a standout example of leading a complete design cycle solo, from identifying the problem to delivering measurable results. It is proof that thoughtful design, grounded in real user insight, can shift both product quality and business confidence.