Inspired by the thrill of daily surprises and the seamless flow of digital rewards, Daily Drop balances excitement with simplicity, turning routine moments into memorable experiences.

Seeing this prompted me to sit down and try to share the essence behind Family, which is as much about connection and experience as it is about technology and design.

This is not a technical post or tutorial. There are many good resources about how to craft smooth animations or design pixel perfect UI, by people much smarter than I am.¹

Benjamin is a fintech app that turns everyday routines into rewarding moments helping users earn cashback by linking their cards, shopping, playing games, or scanning receipts. Most of the experience was built around transactional loyalty, rewarding users after a qualifying action.

But we wanted something more. Something that didn’t just reward behavior, but created it. Something unexpected.

That was the spark behind Daily Drop a new kind of feature built not on transactions, but on emotion. A moment of daily surprise where users swipe to reveal a digital card. Unlike anything we had built before, Daily Drop wasn’t about mechanics. It was about feeling. As the product designer behind it, my task wasn’t just to make it functional it was to make it feel exciting, immersive, and truly special.

Benjamin already had functional systems in place. You shop, scan, or play and earn. But this was different. We wanted a reason for users to return every day, even when they had nothing to scan, no game to play, and no new purchases. It needed to feel exciting but not gimmicky; Be rewarding, even when it didn’t give out real cash; Align with business needs, balancing engagement with sustainability.

But the biggest challenge? This had to feel like nothing else in the app.

I explored several interaction models early on but they either felt too passive or not natural. One of the more ambitious iterations was a 'peel to reveal' interaction, inspired by physical scratch cards. While the concept felt novel, the development cost was high and the interaction didn’t feel as intuitive in testing users found it less natural and more time-consuming. After testing quick prototypes and gathering internal feedback, I leaned into a tactile swiping gesture instead, which struck the right emotional note: familiar, satisfying, and just suspenseful enough.

I started from the inside out. Before pixels, I asked: What does it feel like to peel back a mystery? To reveal a surprise? The UX came first no visual UI yet.

I storyboarded interactions. How would the user flow from opening the app to swiping their Daily Drop? What would anticipation feel like? What feedback did we give when the drop wasn’t a win?

This led to:

• A swiping mechanic for interaction
• Subtle animations to create suspense before reveal
• A rotating reward system to prevent fatigue

Once the skeleton felt right, I moved to UI. The challenge here was visual consistency vs novelty: It had to feel Benjamin, but also stand apart. Cards. Colors. Fonts. Micro-interactions. I designed UI elements that matched what we had in the app already while introducing richer textures and layers and micro-interactions that feels natural and added delight.

We don’t intentionally diminish moments of delight in our less common features — we try to insert delight with varying degrees of ‘intensity’. This way, even our infrequently used features are never treated as an afterthought.

Daily Drop is still in production as of now, but it’s already changed how we think about engagement. It’s not just a feature, it’s a feeling. We wanted to build something memorable, something users would return for not because they had to, but because they wanted to. And the Daily Drop is that space, an unexpected moment of reward that turns habit into happiness.