Real Returns
UI/UX / Branding
Drop in a 2D floor plan, the kind with walls, dimensions, and room labels.
AutoFloorPlan produces a fully furnished, textured, lit top-down render. It reads the layout, understands the rooms, places appropriate furnishings, and renders the scene in a style you choose. You see the before-and-after side by side and iterate from there.
Role
UI/UX Designer, working in a three-person triangle alongside a developer and a brand/creative designer. The brand designer set the visual identity. The developer built the engine. My job was to live in the middle, turning brand into product, turning product into shippable screens, and making sure the result felt like one coherent app instead of three opinions stapled together. Every screen on this page is mine, from information architecture and flow design through final UI handoff.
The Project
Real Returns is a mobile-first real estate investment platform, a category that's exploding in India as fractional property investing moves from a niche product for the wealthy into something a salaried 25-year-old can open on their phone. Which is exactly where the design problem starts: the category assumes a user with deep financial literacy. The audience doesn't have it. The product has to bridge that gap without ever making the user feel talked down to or talked over.
The brief was to build a finance product that felt as light and as familiar as a payments app, while still carrying the weight of "this is where I'm putting real money into real property." Not easy. Most fintech in this space either over-simplifies until it feels like a toy, or over-explains until it feels like a banking portal from 2014. Real Returns needed to land between those two, confident, calm, and quietly substantial.
Key flows I designed
Landing Page & Login
The first impression. I built multiple variants of the landing and login screens to test how the product introduces itself: how much to say up front, how much to defer, where to lead with proof versus product, and what the very first tap should feel like. The whole conversion funnel hinges on these three screens, so they got the most iteration on the entire app.
Onboarding & City Selection
Real estate is hyperlocal. Choosing your city isn't a settings toggle, it's the moment the product becomes relevant to you. I designed the signup flow to make city selection feel like unlocking the experience rather than filling out another form field — with the Hyderabad-specific variant tuned for the launch market.
Properties
The browse-and-evaluate experience. Designing a property listing screen for an investment product is different from designing one for a rental or sales app. The user isn't asking "would I live here?" — they're asking "would this make me money?" Different hierarchy, different data, different emotional pacing. I redesigned the patterns from scratch instead of borrowing from real-estate UX defaults.
Wallet
The trust anchor. Money in, money out, balance, history, transactions. Wallet screens are where users decide whether the rest of the app can be trusted, so every detail matters: how the balance is typographically weighted, how transactions are grouped, how loading and empty states are handled, how a successful action feels versus a failed one.
The design challenge specific to this product:
Trust is the entire product. A user has to feel — before they consciously think about it — that this is a place they can put real money. Every micro-decision in the UI either adds to that feeling or quietly erodes it: how a number aligns, how a percentage change is colored, how confirmation flows are paced, how errors are written. I worked against a single internal test: would a first-time investor and a seasoned one both feel this app was built for them? If either user bounced at any point, the screen wasn't done.
The second challenge was scale across cities. The app couldn't be designed only for Hyderabad — the system had to handle every market that came after, without breaking when content density, property types, or local pricing patterns shifted. So everything was designed as a system, not a one-off.