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  • Hand holding a phone with the Baird mobile application open
  • Hand holding a mobile phone with the Baird application open
  • Sienna Bast coding at her desk
  • Sienna Bast Coding the Baird Mobile application
  • Crowd of people looking at a Post it wall of ideas at a workshop

Centered on you

Through discovery a theme emerged– you should be able to open the app and do anything you need in under 2 minutes.

01

Baird

A century-old financial services company that provides trusted financial advice across generations globally.

Sometimes we all need an advisor

Our relationship began through a competitive RFP for a new dual-platform mobile app (not counting the time we were trapped in an elevator with their Senior Technology Product Manager).

While Baird's market guidance leads the industry, its previous app (built using 3rd-party off-the-shelf libraries) continually frustrated their wealth-management customers who were accustomed to a premium experience, and as a result lead to disastrous ratings in the Google Play and Apple app stores, which of course reflected on Baird.

Hand holding a phone with the Baird mobile app runnning
A short reel we made to promote the app going live to internal teams at Baird.

Delivering returns

They needed a fresh start, and hired Northern Ground to provide it. The new app was conceived from the beginning to put users first, and months of work developing requirements, workshopping, drawing wireframes and building prototypes resulted in a clean and clear way to monitor your wealth, track your financial plan and complete any task in the app in under 2 minutes.

Sometimes the best app is the one that helps you spend the least amount of time using it. Who wants to be on their phone all day? Alright, bad example.

Pie charts of analytics from custom tracking

The app, built in Flutter to support iOS and Android, is full of rich interactive UI to make managing your wealth tangible and easy.

Screenshot of Baird app on mobile phone

An extensive and well-documented design component system provides multiple teams a single source of truth.

As we evolve the design system, these changes are being adapted across other applications and the web.

Co-development

Baird's internal Dev team handled the back-end APIs, while we built the app using Google's Flutter platform (branding designed by our own Grace Bernier) to run on both Android and iPhone, compiled from the same codebase. Paired programming made for close-knit dev work and a hand off that was a non-event. We created a UI component library that will enable the Baird team to scale the app going forward while maintaining the customer experience and aligning with the brand.

Their old app had less than 7k downloads. In the short few months since launching our new and improved version, the number of users has increased 14-fold to 100k and growing! Feedback continues to be overwhelmingly positive.

Northern Ground delivered a new app under budget and launch was a ‘non-event’ with virtually no negative feedback!

Mike McGarrySenior Technology Product Manager

The partnership continues

We work with Baird on new projects, on both the UX design side, as well as bolting onto their development teams when needed. Running workshops, designing UIs for web and internal tools. Baird understands what it means to invest in tools and systems.

Whether the market is up or down, modern, friendly, easy-to-use digital can somehow make everything copacetic.


  • 100,000+ app downloads in the Apple App Store.

  • Went from a 3.2 to a 4.6 star rating.

  • 3,393 Git commits.

  • Led the charge in introducing a new tech stack (Flutter) to Baird IT - a stack that will persist for years to come.

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