Brightday: Australia's first all-in-one investment platform

Brightday’s two legacy platforms were dated and unintuitive: average user satisfaction sat at just 2 out of 5, and many people visited only to complete a single task before leaving. As the product grew, the problem became bigger than any one interface. Brightday needed to serve investors, advisers and fund managers on the same platform, each with different goals and ways of navigating, while also supporting white-label partners who wanted their own branding without a bespoke rebuild every time. All of it had to work within strict financial-services regulation, on screens as small as 375px, without stripping out the information power users relied on. The real question wasn’t how to redesign a dashboard — it was how to design one coherent system that stayed recognisably itself no matter who was using it or how it had been configured.

Brightday’s system only held together because it wasn’t designed in isolation:

Rather than designing a separate experience for every user type, I built the platform around a shared structural framework: core flows, navigation and interaction patterns stayed constant, while the content and modules underneath could be configured. Common patterns were defined once and reused everywhere, so adding a new program or audience didn’t mean redesigning — or re-engineering — the platform’s core behaviour. Personalisation became a system-level capability, not a surface-level feature: users saw tailored content and pathways, while the structure underneath stayed predictable enough to learn once and reuse everywhere.

Early wireframing focused on the dashboard’s structure and cutting unnecessary scrolling. Testing the responsive top navigation on mobile, the existing icon-heavy pattern broke down at small sizes. Rather than force the same navigation to compress, I prototyped a “dock”: a bar fixed to the left edge on desktop and the bottom edge on mobile, holding the same items in both places, just repositioned for context. Users could reorder and choose what appeared in it, so investors, advisers and fund managers could each surface the tools that mattered to them without three separate builds. I kept the development team informed throughout prototyping on purpose, so a pattern that looked simple to sketch didn’t turn into a rebuild once it reached engineering.

Visual design had to do two jobs at once: stay flexible enough to be relicensed to other brands and clients, while still reading as one coherent product. Colour schemes were built to be configurable for distribution partners, so the platform’s palette could shift without the underlying structure changing. At the same time, consistent spacing, typography and hierarchy — plus clearer visibility for interactive elements — reinforced that every configured version was still recognisably one product, not a set of disconnected skins.

Brightday launched with a foundation flexible enough to support multiple personalised programs and user pathways without fragmenting the experience. The unified system reduced design and development overhead, enabled faster iteration, and gave the team a clear framework for future growth: new personalised programs could launch on shared patterns and modular components rather than bespoke design or development work, and web and mobile stayed consistent while still allowing contextual variation. Measurable results followed: mobile access rose 30%, watchlist adoption grew 70%, and the platform was adopted by 20+ business partners after launch. The lasting lesson was that investing in systems thinking early doesn’t just make a product easier to maintain — it’s what makes real personalisation possible at scale without it costing you consistency.