Role: Lead Product Designer (IC Lead)
Team: 1 Product Manager, 1 Engineering Manager, 5 Engineers
Scope: End-to-end redesign of the payment rails enabling onramp and offramp transactions across native wallets, third-party wallets, and web platforms
Key Challenges: Misaligned trade expectations, high cancellation rates, and poor transaction transparency between parties
Impact: Reduced failed transactions, improved payment reliability, and enabled scalable merchant onboarding
For Onboard merchant, I led a team of 7 responsible for the merchant tool suite. Together, we launched improvements across signup, menu management, orders, marketing, payments, and more.
We aim to fix the broken experience and address attrition of new merchants, including existing who have been using manual offline platforms like WhatsApp closed groups and excel sheets to track the ads they list and sell on our platform. The existing dashboard was built for merchants who switched from customers to start selling assets at larger volumes now that we have businesses onboarding with their corporate expectations of a robust ads management, we need to improve the dashboard.
I led the redesign of the rails product that enabled payment processing across multiple platforms (native wallets, 3rd party wallets, webapp): from defining problems, scoping work, ideating design, planning and conducting user research, and partnering with engineers to polish the final product.
I led the redesign of the rails product that enabled payment processing across multiple platforms (native wallets, 3rd party wallets, webapp): from defining problems, scoping work, ideating design, planning and conducting user research, and partnering with engineers to polish the final product.
I collated the merchant support ticket logs from support team and summarized the reported shared challenges in Notion. I setup interviews and user research with merchants and also the merchant ops team on the support side, to understand pain points around ads creation leading to error and missing on large trades. I mapped thes in a pain point matrix in Figjam, allowing the team identify when and where merchants encounter friction and frustration and noting the the severity of the issue and how many merchants are affected
I setup a brainstorming session with the engineering and marketing team, using How Might We statements to frame the key problems we needed solutions to. After votes based on time, effort and impact, I developed a few hypotheses to guide the ideation.
Some key problems I noted:
Trade agreements between buyers and sellers were often ambiguous leading to failed transactions
No standardized flow for how users communicated payment confirmations, which led to delays, errors, and frustration on both sides.
It wasn’t always clear where a payment was in the process, leading to uncertainty and manual intervention
Misaligned expectations, incomplete payments caused transactions to be canceled or disputed, eating into operational efficiency and user trust
Opportunity
There was a clear need to introduce structured, reliable transaction flows that could enforce trade agreements, provide real-time transparency, and reduce manual overhead, without sacrificing flexibility or compliance.
After the team had aligned and voted a set of solutions to explore based on time, effort and business impact, I mapped out userflows to emphasize the improved journey of the user with a faster payment confirmation flow
Grounded in the insights from discovery, my approach focused on redesigning the transaction experience to solve these key critical challenges:
Introduce Transaction State Visibility
Provide real-time status updates and clear, structured steps for each phase of the transaction lifecycle, reducing uncertainty for both users and internal teams.
Reduce Manual Confirmation and Disputes
Automate key touchpoints like payment confirmation, dispute resolution workflows, and status notifications, allowing the system to handle buyer-seller matching without needing manual intervention.
Ideation & Wireframes
I ideated a wireframe that eliminated the extra steps of users filtering through paying merchants when they needed to pay and instead presented a review module after the automated matching
Picking the right solution
I prioritized solutions with a impact vs. effort matrix, while considering key trade-offs like simplicity vs. regulatory compliance
One key learning was balancing the trade-off between user experience and compliance; which came from working with legal stakeholders to weigh in early on, to reduce friction down the line
Ideation & Wireframes
Onboard has built a merchant network model that was replicated across multiple markets. Like every marketplace, we needed a healthy balance of customers and merchants. Coinbase had growing audience in strategic markets and integrated our rails product to enable customers onramp or offramp
Ideation & Wireframes
We'd successfully made ad creation a seamless workflow: accessible and intuitive. Yet, we felt like we could save them one less click with delight, especially for bigger merchants with a sophisticated staff, so we added menu shortcuts, without breaking the experience for regular (less tech-savvy)users: A for Ads, O for Orders, P for profile; these were the most visited screens and flows for them––their"bread and butter!"
Usability tests
I drafted a usability testing interview document with the brief and conducted user tests with few customers to understand how they interacted with these designs and to validated if the effectiveness of automated payment, comprehension of funds in escrow and transaction monitoring. A few key observations:
Indicate if the time expected on each trade
Explain what happens while escrow is a better indicator for money transfer transparency
Overall, the designs proved to improve comprehension of money in escrow and less confusion in transaction monitoring for customers, leading to less cancellations
Outcomes
Reduced cancellations by 65%
Improved transaction success rate which led to reduced attrition rate
Shortened average transaction time from 15minutes to < 1 minute
Increase in revenue after implementation of the instant automated feature
Increase in retention rate D30 which also improved the DAU/MAU Ratio
Ugo Ifezue
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