Laura Sandoval. Senior Product Designer at Uber

Laura SandovalSenior Product Designer at Uber

With its unique functionalities, native iOS look & feel, and deep attention to accessibility and details, Balance has consistently remained among the most downloaded navigation apps in Chile ever since its debut in 2019—reaching the #1 most downloaded Chilean navigation app in 2021 and 2023, right above Google Maps, Moovit, and Waze—and it’s by far the most positively reviewed one among its local alternatives.

Beginnings

Back in 2019, I found myself frustrated with the lack of alternatives for decent transit apps in Chile. I was a heavy transit user (and nerd), so I lived through this frustration daily with official apps that kept breaking, unofficial apps that were far from ideal, and generally speaking, a lack of joy any time I had to check my transit card balance on my phone.

Driven by this personal frustration, I coded a small progressive web app called "Saldo," or "Saldo Red" (in reference to Chile's upcoming new transit system branding, "Red") that was hopefully a bit simpler and more reliable than what the market had to offer at the time.

Though mostly made for myself, I was still curious to see if there was appetite in the market for the product. So I made it public and tweeted about it.

The amount of organic reach and people's reactions to the product gave me the confidence and dopamine boost I needed to keep going, so I quickly began listening to feedback, iterating, and incorporating users' most requested features, like saving more than one card at a time, highlighting the number of trips left more prominently (a feature that's still exclusive to Balance, even more than half a decade later), etc.

As a self-taught engineer, this was the most ambitious technical challenge I had ever embarked on. But it ultimately taught me so much about launching, owning, and iterating on a product that I kept coming back for more.

Present

Today, Balance supports 9 types of transit cards across Chile, it's no longer a website but a native iOS app (re-built from the ground up in Swift in 2021), and it's by far the most positively reviewed transit app in Chile, with almost two thousand reviews on the App Store.

On top of getting your latest transit card balance, it now also supports personalized card artworks, provides live transit information, native iOS widgets for both your Home and Lock Screen, and you can actually use it to ride transit in select Chilean cities through a QR code generated in-app.

This project was not commissioned by, and is not directly related to, any of Chile's official transit authorities.