The Affirm app was a loan repayment tool. We made it somewhere worth browsing.

Users opened the Affirm app without a clear sense of where they were approved or for how much. They weren't shopping with confidence, they were guessing. The fix was a component system built around what users actually needed to know: recall a favorite store, recognize a popular one, discover something new. Simple pieces, stackable into a feed that reflected the full breadth of Affirm’s merchant catalog.

The harder principle was scalability. Every update to the existing app required hard-coding, which made experimentation expensive. The new system let units be added and reordered with little or no engineering involvement.

Prequalification existed per store ($5K at one merchant, $10K at another) but there was no global number to anchor on. Rather than solve that upstream, we moved per-store prequal to the merchant detail page, a tap away from the feed. Users got the confidence signal where it was most relevant: right before they shopped.

Conversion rate increased 30% in the months after launch.