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.
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.
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.
The app, built in Flutter to support iOS and Android, is full of rich interactive UI to make managing your wealth tangible and easy.
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.
Mike McGarryNorthern Ground delivered a new app under budget and launch was a ‘non-event’ with virtually no negative feedback!
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 and digital can somehow make everything copacetic.
150,000+ downloads in the Apple App Store.
Went from a 3.2 to 4.7 stars with 600 ratings and counting.
3,393 Git commits.
Led the charge in introducing a new mobile tech stack (Flutter) to Baird IT - a multi-platform framework that will support Baird's needs for years to come.