Neura · Fintech MVP
Neura turns connected Xero data into cash runway, a health score, and plain-English next steps for business owners who don't read financial reports. I designed the MVP: brief to developer handoff in three weeks.
Neura's target user runs a small business on Xero, is busy, and doesn't understand financials deeply. They care about one question: is cash going to be a problem, and what do I do about it? The backend computes the answers: runway, trends, risk indicators. The design job was making those answers legible to someone under pressure, in seconds, without accounting jargon.
The brief was unusually disciplined and I signed up for that discipline: no discovery phase, no personas, no feature ideation. Five screens maximum. The founder's test for every decision: can a stressed founder understand this in under 30 seconds?
The dashboard leads with cash runway in months and a plain status: stable, watch closely, action needed. Below it, one to three insights ranked by urgency, and every one follows the same contract: what's happening, why it matters now, what to do next. No charts to interpret, no report to decode. The MVP is a decision-support screen, not an analytics dashboard, and the design holds that line everywhere.
Small-business bookkeeping is imperfect by default, so the interface says so instead of pretending. Every insight carries a confidence label and a data-quality badge. A "how we worked this out" layer shows the inputs and key numbers behind each conclusion. Forecasts are hedged the way an honest advisor would hedge them: cash may run tight in about 12 days, not a false-precision date. Calm language, even at high severity.
Five screens became dozens of designed states: first-connect progress, taking-longer-than-expected, partial data, failed sync, empty, resolved. The handoff covered interaction rules, validation limits, and microcopy for every state, down to the API contract for the insight feedback system, so a two-person team could build without a designer on call.
The hard part wasn't designing five screens. It was not designing the sixth. Trend charts, configuration, an insights archive all argued their way into scope conversations and all got cut. Whether the 60-second promise holds is now a measurement question, and I'd rather ship the instrument that answers it than a bigger product that can't.
Design wrapped in three weeks with full developer handoff: responsive layouts, core components, annotated flows, and defined states for every screen. Neura is pre-launch, so the numbers that matter next belong to the product, not the design file.
Neura is pre-launch, so the detailed version with flows, states, and handoff artifacts stays off the public site for now. If we're talking about working together, ask.
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