CV
Emotional design
By the end of 2021, I launched 3 emotional design features, which made Sberbank app personal ang recognizable – intro greetings (2M MAU), avatar creator (1,4M MAU), color themes
This story is a sample of how small technical problem might ask an unarticulated need and create an opportunity to start a new product stream or even become a trend among other banking services.
All started from top-3 user requests. They were negative about the app loading speed. The median entry was 4.7 seconds until the client saw the balance.
The problem was mostly technical. There were too much simultaneous requests to processing servers. Fix it–it's not a walk in the park at all. So, I decided to do focus on versatility and accentuate a "weak point" by giving people a choice what to see on a welcome screen.
In 2020, an average Sber app customer opened the application 3.4 times daily. The DAU metric already was about 30M+ users, but it was an idea to raise stickiness, so, it became a new north star metric.
The idea was to create an attractor that might smoothen the loading experience, meet the ask about stickiness, and make another 'boring banking app' a little bit more personal.

My team developed the backend and set up CDN while I was focused on collaborations. We decided to promote welcome packs as an enhancement to current client experience.
Our first custom welcome pack was dedicated to 'Impressionism' and made in collaboration with Hermitage, one of the most renowned nationwide art museums located in St. Petersburg.
It was a pack of 16 masterpieces made by Monet, Sezanne, Pisarro and others. Clients played a quiz guessing the names of the artists at the banking app's welcome screen.

Press-release (Rus)
The launch sadly coincided with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, so the real exhibition opening was postponed, so we promoted welcome screens feature as 'virtual exhibition' in PR activities.
The pack with mesmerizing Russian nature made by indie-travellers became a hit with 2,000,000+ installs in the first months
It wasn’t surprising—after all, nature landscapes have long been the essence of digital wallpapers, as we’ve seen with Windows backgrounds. But it proved that even ‘unarticulated client needs’ can sometimes drive a breakthrough in the metrics.
Then, we released a 2041 pack with Bang! Bang! illustrative agency representing visions of a future by 15 modern artists.
Dreams of how we’ll live in 2041—the year Sber celebrates its 200th anniversary. We selected the 15 best artworks and compiled them into a pack. Here is a feature highlight where you can discover more.
I was eager to achieve versatility in welcome screen pack selection and sought visually appealing images elsewhere.
I contacted Alex Semyonov, whom I knew from the Aquatilis project fundrising, and revealed his science art to a broad audience to show the beauty underwater sea species.
Science-related images seemed a fresh take, so we partnered with Science 2.0 TV to create another pack about miracles visible only via macro photography.
Then we made a third pack co-authored with neural network DALL-E. In 2021 it was far away from today's quality of image generation. However, I obtained a Bronze A'Design Award for 'Science as an Emotional Trend' welcome screens project. That consists three packs: Jellyfish, Macro and generative art made by 'robots'.
Once we arranged an imagined rivalry between classic paintings and XX-century artists, looking at this confrontation by the number of downloads.
Now we know that our customers root for Shishkin and Levitan 6 times more than for Malevich, Petrov-Vodkin, and XX century's art in general. Special thanks to Tretyakov's gallery for helping us to discover this amazing insight.
At the end of the year we launched 8 welcome packs and achieved 6,5M+ installs in total.
We also bring to life a new space for visually appealing collaborations and a foundation to translate our values or just greet people personally with their birthdays. All that became technically possible thanks to the efforts of my 'User Emotions' team.
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Color themes
Next big thing I dreamed of was the idea to allow users to change the color theme of their app. And our design system recently unlocked this opportunity.
Despite the fact that 'color of the day' seemed just like a nice-to-have thing, I thought about it as an opportunity to make our design system even more flexible and adaptable to usage in other Sber's ecosystem apps from e-comm, entertainment, logistics, etc.
About 1,000,000 users changed the color theme to the new one during first week after launch
Remember when Tim Cook came out from behind a lilac bush at one of the presentations where a lavender iPhone was presented? That day, we already had the lavender color released. Among our users, this color has become the most popular one.

Also, we extend our new design system components' ability to work not only in light and dark themes but also with any of the color schemes. In the dark theme, the colors are not as accentuated and are noticeably muted when compared to the light one.
Each color theme from now on was accompanied by a dark mode and meet WCAG 2.1 standarts
Afterwards, we obtained a pretty developed and flexible system of tokens, which allowed us to offer our design system to other services from the Sber ecosystem, regardless of their brand color. Our typography and components became adaptable and worked perfectly for both dark and light backgrounds.
Just after two months 3,7 millions switched to the new light themes and tried our feature. CSI of this "nice-to-have feature" was unsurprizingly better than every other financial feature.

But we didn't stop here. We had one more idea, that might emphasize us the idea of ecosystem and united user profile among Sber services.
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User Avatars
We dreamed of an avatar constructor for ecosystem apps with a digital clothing store and were ready to test this hypothesis.
By that time I've packed a cross-functional team "User Emotions", that developed welcome screen packs and color themes. We launched MLP with the simple 2D-version to try on UX, but then decided to make a constructor using our new 3D-characters made by Petrick.
Brand characters created by my department were used in a global Sber Ecosystem guidelines.
So, as our visual assets library were going to scale at the whole ecosystem, we tried to fill with lots of neat presets, cuz as we know, the further from the source of scaling — the worse quality of implementation is.
So we tried to reveal them in user avatars. We also hoped to boost strategical feature called 'Chats' which were an interpretation of ordinary transfers, but with text messages, postcards and stickers.
People unlikely uploaded their real photos, but we guessed that avatars might increase stickiness and force people to spend more time having fun in ecosystem apps. So we made them emotionally fulfilled, non neutral.
The feature was a part of user profile and allowed people to create avatar using 1,700+ elements. And feature obtained 1,8M+ MAU in July 2021.
Besides that, we solved a huge technical quest with CDN and storages allowing users upload their own photos as avatars. In first three months 6,3M avatars were uploaded from gallery and camera, and 3,7M were created in constructor made by my team.
We even made an avatar auto-creation based on a freshly taked selfie.
Avatars became a pretty popular feature, but despite that we haven't made it in terms of PnL, so after a few attempts to revive the project we had to stop developing it and focus on welcome screens and helping design system team scale their destiny.
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