Meridian

Designing and building a wealth-management app with AI, end to end

Meridian is a personal wealth-management app I designed and built with AI as a collaborator, from the first product decision through a real, shipped codebase. This case study covers how I defined the product, how the visual design evolved through several real iterations, what the finished app looks like and does, and the UX refinements I pushed for after the first working build.

The problem

People's financial lives are scattered with money spread across banks, brokerages, and spreadsheets, with no single view of net worth, and budgets that live disconnected from goals and portfolio data.

Meridian is built for people who manage their own finances day to day, not for the highest-income segment chasing a private wealth platform. The target user wants one accessible place to see everything — dashboard, budget, goals, portfolio — in an app that feels a little elevated and genuinely engaging to use, without requiring a finance background to understand.

Process

I worked through five stages, using AI as a collaborator at each one:

  1. Define — a full product requirements document

  2. Design system — tokens and palette before any screens

  3. Prototype — a static, coded HTML version

  4. Build — real, working app functionality

  5. Ship — a public GitHub repository

Product Requirements

Before any design work, I wrote a full PRD: problem statement, target users, and project scope.

In scope: Dashboard and net worth, Savings goals, Monthly budget, Portfolio review, Settings, Secure auth with MFA.

Out of scope: trade execution, tax or legal advice, live advisor calls, automated bank sync (v1).

Visual design evolution

The visual system went through several passes before landing on the shipped version.

V1 — Editorial. Bodoni Moda and Figtree, a gold accent, cream surfaces. It looked premium but read closer to a lifestyle magazine than a place to trust with your money.

V3 — Institutional. Lora and Inter, a deep navy primary, a teal accent, monospace for financial figures — a more bank-grade, precise direction.

V5 — Shipped. Georgia and a system sans, a warm cream background, and a more vibrant, engaging color palette across the charts and category tags. This version kept the elevated feel of the earlier passes while making the day-to-day data — spending categories, allocation charts, goal progress — visually livelier and easier to read at a glance.