Designing the app that lets Latin American entrepreneurs get paid from their phone
2022 - 2025
Payphone
Services
Design Systems
Interaction Design
UX Strategy
Client
Payphone
Location
Ecuador
Year
2022 - 2025
Payphone is one of Ecuador's leading fintech platforms — a digital wallet that lets people send money, pay bills, and collect payments entirely from their phones. What started as a payments app evolved over six years into a financial tool used by hundreds of thousands of people across the country. I joined Payphone as the sole designer in 2019 and stayed for six years. In that time I designed Version 4 — the version currently in production — from the ground up: flows, components, interaction patterns, and the full visual system. I also contributed UI direction to Version 5, the upcoming release, where the focus shifted from building new features to refining the experience based on what real users actually did with V4. Working as the only designer meant owning every decision — from early whiteboard sessions with product managers to production handoff with engineers. There was no design team to review work or share the load. That constraint shaped how I think about design: methodically, with clear rationale, and always with an eye on what can actually ship.
Payphone's core users are not shoppers. They are sellers — independent entrepreneurs, street vendors, small business owners — people who needed a way to charge clients by card or digital wallet without a POS terminal, a merchant account, or any formal financial infrastructure. The challenge was not building a payments app. The challenge was building a tool that felt like it was made for someone running a business from their phone, not someone with a desk and a bank relationship. Every flow had to work for a market vendor in Quito who had thirty seconds between customers. Every error state had to be recoverable without calling support. Every new feature had to fit into a mental model that millions of people had already built. When I joined, the app was functional but fragmented — different flows had been designed at different times by different people, and it showed. Users could complete transactions, but the experience felt like a collection of tools instead of a single product. That was the real problem to solve.
The first thing I did was map every flow in the existing app against real usage data. What people actually used daily versus what we assumed they used were two very different things. The collection flow — generating a payment link or charging a client directly — was the heartbeat of the product. Everything else needed to support it, not compete with it. I restructured the information architecture around that insight. The home screen became a launch pad for the two actions that mattered most: collect and pay. Secondary features moved deeper into the navigation without disappearing entirely. This sounds obvious in retrospect. It took three months of iteration and a lot of uncomfortable conversations with stakeholders who wanted their feature front and center. The component system came next. Without a design system, every screen was a negotiation — engineers guessing at spacing, colors diverging between screens, edge cases handled inconsistently. I built the component library from scratch in Figma, documented the patterns, and established a shared language between design and development that we used for the rest of my time there. For Version 5, the approach was different. V4 had been live for years and we had real data. I reviewed session recordings, support tickets, and feedback from the sales team to identify where the experience broke down. V5 is not a redesign — it is a response. Every change has a reason rooted in how people actually used V4, not in aesthetic preference.
Version 4 shipped and reached 365,000 registered users, with 13 to 15 percent active monthly — a number that held consistent across multiple quarters, which in fintech is a signal of genuine utility, not novelty. More meaningful to me than the numbers was watching the product become infrastructure. Payphone stopped being an app people tried and became something they relied on. That shift happens slowly and you only notice it when it has already happened. Looking back, there are decisions I would make differently. In the early years I moved fast without enough documentation, which created technical debt in the component system that took time to untangle. I also underestimated how much the onboarding experience affected long-term retention — it was something we improved late, when the data made it impossible to ignore. Both of those lessons shaped how I approach new products today.
