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 payment cancellations by 65%; Improved transaction success rate, which led to reduced attrition rate; Shortened average transaction time from 15 minutes to less than 1 minute; Increase in retention rate D30, which also improved the DAU/MAU Ratio
Onboard has established a cross-border payment infrastructure that allows users to move money across borders using stablecoin assets seamlessly. Users could onramp and offramp across a network of liquidity providers and merchants. However, the early version of this system faced significant friction:
Communication between parties was manual and error-prone, with no structured way to handle payment confirmations or delays.
Transaction monitoring was cumbersome due to pricing fluctuations, timing mismatches, and incomplete payments.
These issues led to a high rate of cancellations, delayed transactions, and poor user trust in the system. My goal was to redesign the experience from the ground up by simplifying transaction flows, increasing transparency, and improving reliability for all participants while respecting regulatory complexity
I led the redesign of the Rails product that enabled payment processing across multiple platforms (native wallets, third-party wallets, web app), from defining problems to scoping work, ideating design, planning and conducting user research, and partnering with engineers to polish the final product.
I took a 30-minute shift on Intercom for a week to interface with irate users. I also led a series of stakeholder interviews and user research sessions with users, merchants, and liquidity providers to understand shared challenges around late payments, confusion, and difficulty confirming payment status.
I also conducted journey mapping workshops with product and engineering teams to visualise the existing process from user and system perspectives. This helped identify where handoffs were breaking down and where user needs were underserved.
Some key problems I noted:
Trade agreements between buyers and sellers were often ambiguous, leading to failed transactions.
There was no standardised 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, leading to uncertainty and manual intervention.
Misaligned expectations and incomplete payments caused transactions to be cancelled 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 on a set of solutions to explore based on time, effort and business impact, I mapped out user flows to emphasise 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 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 prioritised solutions with an 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
Earlier iteration launched: filtering through a list of merchants - this version introduced more variables for customization that created congnitive overload for users—not what we wanted
The approach here was to break down the barrier early: The best way to convince them to try something is to address those questions as they come to mind, like we did on the escrow flow [left]
Prototype: with automated matching, users skip manual trade terms which causes delays
Iteration of accessible support during transaction monitoring
Ideation & Wireframes
Most users access Onboard through mobile devices, while most merchants access it through a desktop. I ensured the designs scale responsively for both mobile and desktop
Desktop: Reimagined escrow flow, scaled for web users. Tap to view initial iteration
Desktop: Redesigned transaction monitoring screen scaled for web users
Desktop: paying through a web app, where the payment infra is integrated to facilitate money movement
Usability tests
I drafted a usability testing interview document with the brief. I conducted user tests with a few customers to understand how they interacted with these designs and to validate the effectiveness of automated payment, comprehension of funds in escrow and transaction monitoring. A few key observations:
Indicate the time expected for each trade.
Explain what happens while escrow is a better indicator of money transfer transparency.
Overall, the designs proved to improve comprehension of money in escrow and reduce confusion in transaction monitoring for customers, leading to fewer cancellations
Growth & Scaling
As part of Onboard’s global growth plans, we had to develop a payment widget to be integrated into Coinbase's wallet to facilitate trade for more customers. This led to increased revenue from the new customers.
Outcomes
Reduced payment cancellations by 65%
Improved transaction success rate which led to reduced attrition rate
Shortened average transaction time from 15minutes to < 1 minute
Reduced payment cancellations 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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