Users rarely send a complaint before they delete an app. They see a balance that loads three seconds late, a transfer screen that asks for the same code twice, or a fee that appears only at the final step. Then they quietly move thei money to a competitor.
At Goodface agency, when a client brings us an app with falling retention and a wave of one-star reviews, we start with the moments where users stopped believing the product and leave the visual refresh for later.
Start with evidence
A redesign that begins in Figma usually ends up back to square one. Before we draw a single screen, we map out where trust breaks.
You can go over app store reviews and sort complaints by theme, pull support tickets from the last two quarters, and study session recordings to see where users hesitate.
The audit typically turns up a short list of repeat offenders: a transfer screen that doesn’t confirm success or a balance that takes six seconds to load. Fix those, and you change the opinion users tell each other about your product.
Fix stability and speed before anything visual
Crashes and slow loading destroy trust faster than any interface flaw. When a banking app freezes during a payment, users don’t blame the network. They assume their money is at risk.
At the kick-off, we set up performance baselines: cold start time, crash-free session rate, and API response times for the key screens. Then our engineers work through the biggest bottlenecks alongside the design team. Skeleton screens and optimistic UI make the app feel responsive, but they only work when the backend underneath is fast enough to keep that promise.
We design and build both sides, so the interface never promises something the architecture can’t deliver.
Make every money-related action explicit
In fintech, ambiguity reads as risk. Every movement across the app must be transparent and shouldn’t leave the user unsure of their next action.
Our digital product design company redesigns critical flows around clear states: what’s about to happen, what is happening, and what has happened.
Fees that surface after the fact put customer loyalty in the red faster than almost anything else. We put every charge on screen before the user commits.
Rethink onboarding and permissions
First impressions set the tone for the whole relationship. Set the tone first — explain how the users benefit from using your app. Asking for additional info (contacts, location, notifications) straight away without any explanation looks somewhat suspicious.
We restructure onboarding so the app requests each permission at the moment it’s needed and explains why in one short line. Drop-off at verification is one of the most expensive leaks, and most of it comes from uncertainty rather than effort.
Make security visible without slowing users down
Users want to feel protected, when needed. They don’t want to jump through hoops every time they open the app.
Focus the design on this: show security at the moments that matter and keep it quiet the rest of the time.
In our process, we set biometric login as the default, keep session timeouts reasonable, and reserve extra verification for high-risk actions like adding a new payee or changing a phone number.
Bring back consistency
Years of quick feature releases leave many apps looking like several products stitched together with different button styles and icons that carry different meanings on different screens. The inconsistency makes users second-guess every tap.
We build a design system as part of the redesign, with a shared library of components, tokens, and copy rules that designers and developers use from the get-go. It fixes today’s inconsistencies and keeps new features from throwing a wrench in the works six months later.
Microcopy gets the same attention: error messages explain what went wrong and what to do next, speaking the “language” the customer actually understands.
Roll out the redesign without shocking loyal users
Even a better interface can backfire if it lands overnight. Loyal users rely on muscle memory, and moving the “Transfer” button can feel like a betrayal to someone who taps it every day.
We plan releases in phases. Feature flags let us ship redesigned flows to a small user segment first, compare metrics against the old version, and fix issues before a wider launch. Short in-app walkthroughs point out what changed, and for a limited period users can switch back to the previous version of key screens, keeping the redesign from turning into an eleventh-hour crisis for the support team.
Measure trust, then keep measuring
Trust is hard to quantify directly, but its signals are easy to spot. We track the metrics that show whether users rely on the app again:
- App store rating trend and the themes in new reviews
- Support ticket volume per flow, especially payments and login
- Completion rates for transfers, top-ups, and identity verification
- Retention by cohort, before and after each release
- The share of users who enable biometric login and notifications, since people grant that access only to apps they depend on
We set targets for each metric before launch and review them with the client at 30, 60, and 90 days. When a number moves the wrong way, we go back into the session recordings and fix the flow behind it.
The bottom line
Customers give their trust back when an app proves, over hundreds of small interactions, that their money and data are safe with it. A new visual style can’t do that alone. It takes research, UX, UI, and engineering working on the same problems in the same order.
Goodface designs and develops mobile products for fintech and other industries where reliability decides growth. If your ratings are sliding or your retention curve is heading south, we’ll audit your app, map out the fixes with the biggest effect on user trust, and lead the redesign from strategy to launch.