Alejandro Hernández
Company
Bancolombia Innovation Lab
Type
B2B Dashboard + Consumer Mobile Feature
Role
Product Designer
Year
2020–2021
Bancolombia had a lot of transactional data coming in from its merchant network, and most of it was just sitting there. Merchants had access to analytics through Plink but weren't really opening the product. Meanwhile the bank had millions of users in its app and wasn't doing anything interesting with that reach.
Plink Offers was basically a bridge between those two problems. If merchants could use their own data to run promotions, they'd have a reason to engage with the product. And if consumers started seeing relevant offers inside their banking app, that's a reason to actually open it.
Businesses needed to create, manage, and track offers through a dashboard. A lot of them weren't very comfortable with digital tools. Consumers just needed to find and use those offers inside the Bancolombia app they already had on their phones.
Basically two completely different users. Designing for both at the same time was where things got complicated.
Credits: Javier Calle
I spent most of my time on three things. Prototypes to get alignment before anyone wrote a line of code. The actual UI work. And staying close enough to the engineers that handoff didn't eat all of it.
I built around 15 high-fidelity prototypes over the project. Some were for user testing, but most of them were really just a way to get everyone on the same page fast: stakeholders, developers, whoever needed to make a call. A working prototype answered questions that a static mockup couldn't.
No design system. The visual identity was built from scratch, and components got added as new parts of the product came up.
The dashboard had to work for a very wide range of business owners, including a lot of people who had never used anything like it before.
Business owners needed to quickly understand what was happening with their customers. That meant summarizing complex data without making them feel like they needed to be analysts.
There was no way to personalize the layout due to technical constraints. One fixed information hierarchy had to work for every kind of business on the platform.
I was the main point of contact between design and engineering. That meant delivering assets, keeping specs current, and going through every implemented screen before it reached users to catch anything that had drifted from the original designs. If something looked wrong in production, it was my call to flag it.
I left the project before the public launch. The product reached an advanced state of readiness during my involvement, with core business flows and the consumer-facing offer experience fully designed, tested, and handed off.
Plink has since evolved as a platform and continues to be part of Bancolombia's product ecosystem.
Product Owner: Paul Castaño, Design Direction: Javier Calle, Product Design: Javier Calle, Alejandro Hernández, UX Support: Juan Reina