Balance — Your transit cards in one place

Product Design, Engineering, Independent Apps

Balance is Chile’s top-rated transit app.


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.

Initial MVP for Balance, in the form of a progressive web app. Circa 2019.

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.

At the beginning of 2019, I launched an MVP web version of my app, back then called "Saldo Red" instead of "Balance," and used Twitter to gut-check if there was any consumer appetite for something like this.
Thanks to the tweet, the app got some news coverage as well. 2019.

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.

Designing for future versions of the app. Circa 2019

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

Balance in 2024.

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.

Users can save and customize as many transit cards as they want.
Each card has a different set of artwork options, based on the card's historical context as well as platform-wide themes like Pride.

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

Period

Since 2019

Client

Balance

Sector

Transport

Discipline

Product Design

Engineering

Independent Apps

Design

Laura Sandoval

iOS Engineering

Laura Sandoval

Backend Engineering

Eduardo Riveros

Laura Sandoval

Special thanks to

Matías Martínez

Héctor Vergara

Varsha Ashok


Cornershop by Uber

Product Design, Design Management

From 2020 to 2023, led Consumer Product Design at Cornershop by Uber.


Cornershop by Uber