Designing gold
to feel like money.

Design for what happens after the purchase.

Buying gold was already central to Walgold. Gold as Currency expanded the question: once people owned gold, what could they do with it?

Transfer was already available. Gifting appeared in our early explorations. We also had to consider a future in which Walgold might offer a bank card for spending gold. Together, these possibilities pointed toward a product with an ongoing role in someone’s financial life.

This made the banking reference useful at a structural level. A balance, the actions attached to it, and a clear way to find services could help people understand gold as something they could use. The interface also needed room for capabilities beyond the ones available at the time.

The strategic ambition shaped both the product’s mental model and the structure that would support its growth.

Bring an account-first experience into the review.

The original home already showed the gold balance and its toman equivalent. Below it, a large price chart led into cash and installment buying, followed by physical gold products and delivery. Its hierarchy emphasized acquiring gold.

Our first draft explored a different emphasis. Available balance, funding, and reporting were grouped together. Goals, installment progress, price information, and automatic saving appeared as service cards.

We brought this draft to the design review meeting to discuss the implications of the new strategy. The screens made an abstract ambition easier to evaluate: could this feel like an account people would return to and use?

Make the balance the starting point.

The revised home brought the gold balance together with Buy gold and Deposit toman inside the main card. The account and its immediate actions could be read as one group.

Price remained visible as a compact tile alongside savings, installment purchase, and credit. This reduced the dominance of market information and gave other financial activities a place in the experience.

Our working rule was simple: help people understand their account, then help them choose an action. Simplicity came from the hierarchy and grouping of information.

Give every feature a home, without crowding the home.

The broader strategy created a practical design problem. As Walgold’s capabilities expanded, putting every service on the home would make the account harder to read.

We designed a scalable feature hub: a dedicated place to discover the product’s services. The home could stay focused on the account, while the hub gave all features a consistent place in the navigation. New capabilities could join this structure as the product evolved.

The hub also made the strategic direction visible through actions. Transfer appeared alongside services such as physical delivery, saving, installment buying, and toman credit. This showed a wider range of things people could do with Walgold.

Start with the capability people already had.

In the early drafts, we explored gifting gold as a way for it to move between people. A birthday gift card explored how receiving gold could feel personal.

For the first step, we made the existing transfer feature more prominent in the hub. This connected the long-term strategy to something people could already use. Giving transfer a clearer place inside a banking-like experience helped present it as a natural action to take with a balance.

We were also designing with a possible bank card in mind. If people could eventually spend gold through a card, the product would need a structure that could accommodate that service. The account and hub provided a direction for that future. Gifting and the card were possibilities considered in the design; the immediate step described here was greater visibility for transfer.

Let the tiles reflect the state of each service.

We designed the home around modular tiles whose shape and content could change with the user’s needs and the state of each service. Illustrated tiles introduced the available features. When a service was in use, its module could give more space to the information needed to keep track of it.

A savings tile could show the amount saved. Credit could surface a payment due date and the next action, while an installment tile could show repayment progress. A cash-balance row could also appear below the main account card. The modules changed their layout and emphasis to fit the information they carried.

The gold balance remained the starting point in both states. This gave the home a consistent structure while supporting two needs: discovering what Walgold offered and managing services already in use. It extended our simplicity principle into the tile system—show the information that matters for the current situation.

How the strategy shaped the design.

Focus on one amount at a time.

Buying and selling remained core actions. Their redesign carried the same emphasis on familiar, straightforward financial interactions.

The previous entry screen used two boxed fields for toman and grams, with preset amount choices. The redesign gave one active amount the strongest visual focus and placed its converted equivalent in a smaller secondary element. A dedicated numeric keypad occupied the lower part of the screen.

The sequence was easy to read: enter an amount, understand its equivalent, and continue. Both versions still included entry and confirmation; we focused on the clarity and emphasis within those stages.

Give payment review its own space.

In the earlier purchase flow, confirmation appeared in a bottom sheet with a card dropdown and a separate wallet-payment toggle. The revised purchase confirmation used a full screen: the transaction summary at the top, bank cards listed below, and the amount repeated in the final payment action.

This made card selection visible within the review screen. The selling designs retained a bottom-sheet confirmation; the full-screen change shown here belongs specifically to buying.

Average gold transfer activity grew by 80%.

After the redesign, average gold transfer activity increased by 80%, while purchase activity remained unchanged. Transfer was an existing capability, so the increase reflected greater use of something the product already supported.

We interpreted this as a response to the combination of a more familiar banking-like experience and greater visibility for transfer in the hub. It was an encouraging signal for Gold as Currency: the capability that allowed gold to move between people saw greater use within the changed experience.

Monitoring online feedback also surfaced positive comments about simplicity and satisfaction. These were qualitative signals from the conversations we observed, rather than a formal satisfaction score.

The outcome sharpened our definition of success. A strategy built around using gold needed evidence of use beyond buying; purchase growth alone would have missed the clearest change in behavior.

A new strategy can change the meaning of an existing feature.

Gold as Currency gave us a reason to rethink Walgold’s hierarchy, navigation, and transaction patterns together. The account-first home established the relationship, the hub made services discoverable, modular tiles reflected the state of each service, and simpler flows carried that direction through individual actions.

Transfer made the connection tangible. The capability already existed; giving it a clearer role in the product helped us take a first step toward the broader ambition. Gifting and a possible bank card shaped how far ahead the design needed to look.

The project also changed how we thought about success. As the intended role of gold expanded, we needed to look beyond purchases and examine the behaviors that made that role possible. The next question would be whether people returned to transfer gold again, and whether that use became part of a sustained habit.

The strategy changed how we presented the account—and the role an existing feature could play within it.

About the figures: original Persian Walgold designs are reproduced with English annotations. The annotated boards supplied for this case study replace the individual frame screenshots. UI amounts are design content, not performance metrics.