Case Study 03 — Payments · Banking · Dashboards

Paylode Services

End-to-end design leadership for a payments company — consumer bills, payment gateways, and the operations dashboards behind them.

Role: Lead UI/UX Designer
Timeline: Jul 2022 — Oct 2023
Company: Paylode Services · Lagos, NG (Remote)
Platform: Web · Admin tools
Tools: Figma · Slack · Notion

Paylode operates in Nigeria's online payments space — bills payment, payment gateway services and banking-adjacent financial products. As Lead UI/UX Designer I led and contributed to the design and development of multiple user-centred, end-to-end interfaces across that portfolio.

Payments design is a two-sided problem: the consumer paying a bill in thirty seconds, and the operations staff reconciling thousands of those payments behind the scenes. Both sides deserved interfaces designed with the same rigour.

Money moments tolerate zero confusion. In bills payment and gateways, every ambiguous state — pending, failed, reversed — becomes a support ticket or a lost customer.
The back office was invisible. Operations staff needed administrative dashboards with the features to work efficiently, but nobody had gathered their requirements.
A public-sector side quest. A Lagos State scholarship portal needed to register and manage available scholarships and applicants — accessible to a broad, non-technical audience.

Requirements with cross-functional teams

I collaborated with cross-functional teams and stakeholders to gather requirements and translate them into effective design solutions — sitting with product, engineering and business owners to turn "we need a gateway dashboard" into defined screens, states and edge cases.

Designing for the money moment

For the consumer-facing payment flows, I designed every state explicitly — success, pending, failure, reversal — so users always knew where their money stood. The interface copy did the reassurance work; the visuals did the clarity work.

The back office, designed properly

I worked closely with staff to gather the requirements that made certain the administrative dashboards included features that enabled them to work efficiently — built from their actual daily workflows rather than assumptions about them. Internal tools are products too; treating them that way cut the friction in operations work.

Seamless handoff to developers

I worked closely with developers to ensure seamless implementation of designs — staying available through the build, resolving ambiguity early, and reviewing implemented screens against the design intent rather than throwing specs over a wall.

Lagos State scholarship portal

Alongside the core product work, I helped design a Lagos State scholarship portal to register and manage available scholarships and applicants — a public-facing flow designed for first-time internet users as much as for administrators.

A coherent payments portfolio

Multiple end-to-end interfaces for bills payment, gateways and banking products — designed as one system, not disconnected screens.

Operations that work

Administrative dashboards shaped by the staff who use them daily, with the features their workflows actually need.

Public-sector reach

A Lagos State scholarship portal designed for a broad audience — from applicants to administrators.

Design every state, or the user designs it for you. In payments, the unhappy paths are the product.
Internal tools deserve research. An afternoon watching operations staff work beat weeks of guessing at dashboard requirements.
Handoff is a relationship, not a deliverable. Staying close to developers through the build is what "seamless implementation" actually requires.

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