A mobile-first payment flow that keeps users informed and in control at every step.
I led the UX for a mobile-first payment flow built to hold all of that: a checkout that supports a wide variety of payment methods, honours KYC and product-specific rules, and — critically — keeps the user aware of exactly what’s happening at every step, without ever interrupting or alarming them.
role
At Fram Creative
Scope
And a new Builder
Market
Covarage
overview
The flow is the payment engine behind the product — the sequence a user moves through from choosing how to pay to seeing their money safely land. It supports many payment types (cards, wallets, bank and account-based transfers, and product-specific methods), each with different rails, timing, and requirements.
My remit covered the whole journey end to end: method selection, input, verification, authorisation, processing, and every possible outcome in between. That meant designing not only the happy path, but the full state machine around it — pending, requires-action, redirected, declined, retryable, successful — and a communication system that keeps the user oriented through all of it. I worked closely with product, engineering, and compliance to design something that stays simple on the surface while carrying real regulatory and technical weight underneath.
Three kinds of complexity had to coexist on one small screen.
Variety: Each payment method behaves differently — different steps, speeds, and points of failure. Left unmanaged, that becomes a maze of one-off screens the user has to relearn every time.
Constraints: KYC, verification tiers, limits, and strong authentication are required friction. Handled badly, they feel like walls that appear from nowhere and stop a payment dead.
State: A payment is rarely instant or binary — it can be processing, waiting on the user or a bank, redirected, declined, or quietly succeeding. Every state has to be communicated, and money makes people jumpy, so an unclear or badly timed message breaks trust immediately.
Goal 1:
One flow across.
Design a single, consistent frame that adapts to each payment type’s specifics through progressive disclosure and smart defaults — so users learn the pattern once, and the differences between methods surface only when they matter
Goal 2:
Make compliance feel like part of the journey
Design KYC, verification, and authentication so they’re understandable and clearly justified in the moment — explained, well-timed, and minimally disruptive — rather than arriving as unexplained walls. Encode the rules under the hood; keep the surface calm.
Goal 3: Keep the user oriented and reassured at every step
Build a clear system of status, success, and error communication that always shows what’s happening without hijacking the screen — reserving interruption for the rare moments a decision is genuinely required, and writing every message in plain, non-alarming, actionable language.
Reflection
The flow turned the most fragile moment in the product into one of its most trustworthy. Instead of a scattering of one-off payment screens, users move through a single, predictable pattern that quietly adapts to whichever method they choose — and the compliance steps that used to feel like dead ends now read as understood, expected parts of the journey.
The biggest shift was in how the system talks to the user. By matching each message to its real weight — a quiet inline status for things happening in the background, a clear prompt only when the user actually needs to act, plain-language recovery guidance when something fails — the flow keeps people continuously aware without ever startling them. Errors stopped being dead ends and became next steps; success and progress became visible rather than assumed. The result is a payment experience where users feel in control of their money at every stage, which is the foundation everything else in a financial product is built on.
Underneath, the state model and messaging system were designed as reusable foundations — so new payment methods, markets, and edge cases can be added without re-solving status, error handling, or compliance from scratch.
