Most fintech apps look like a spreadsheet with rounded corners.

A 30 year design veteran just shared what they learned from a year of solo-building a data-intensive product. The core lesson is uncomfortable. Stop designing shells and decorating them with data. Treat the data as the interface itself.

That sounds abstract until you try it. The structure of your data should drive page layout. The relationships in your data should drive navigation. The states of your data should drive interaction patterns.

This is why so many crypto dashboards, trading terminals, and analytics tools feel broken. They were designed as a Figma file first, then forced to fit real data later. The data fought back.

Next time you start a data-heavy product, work in the real dataset before you open Figma. Sketch screens directly from the schema and the empty states. The layout will design itself.