Product Background
PalmPay is a digital financial services platform that makes everyday transactions easier and more accessible through its mobile app.
From sending and receiving money to paying bills, buying airtime and managing subscriptions, PalmPay brings many of the financial activities people regularly rely on into one place. The platform also uses rewards, referrals and other incentives to encourage users to transact more frequently within the ecosystem.
For many users, PalmPay offers a simpler alternative to relying solely on a traditional bank account for everyday payments, particularly for quick transfers and routine transactions.
With a growing number of services living within the app, the experience needs to do more than simply provide functionality. It has to make those services easy to find, understand and use. This formed the broader context for the design problem I explored in this case study.
Goal
- Identify usability issues through research
- Create and validate assumptions
- Improve user interface and experience
- Discover an easy way to reach goals
Design process
Discovering the problem
A good product should feel easy to understand, even when a user is interacting with it for the first time. While using PalmPay, I noticed this wasn't always the case.
Finding and exploring some features took more effort than expected, and I occasionally encountered glitches while completing everyday tasks without a clear explanation of what had gone wrong.
Rather than rely solely on my own experience, I wanted to see whether other users faced similar challenges. I reviewed feedback and ratings on the Google Play Store, paying particular attention to recurring complaints and patterns across different reviews.
From this research, several usability issues consistently stood out:
After validating the issues through research, I narrowed my focus to the problems that had the biggest impact on the user experience.
From there, I began exploring possible solutions and prioritising the areas where design could make the experience clearer, simpler and easier to use.
This gave me a defined set of challenges to address throughout the redesign.
- Improve account security - Introduce a dedicated sign-in experience that gives users a clearer and more secure way to access their accounts.
- Create a feedback system - Give users a simple way to report issues, share feedback and understand what happens when something goes wrong.
- Simplify the home experience - Redesign the home screen to make important features easier to find, understand and use.
Explored Solution
The goal was not to redesign everything, but to improve the parts of the experience that created the most friction. I focused on a few key solutions that could make PalmPay easier to understand, navigate and use.
- Authentication
Adding a first layer of security increases the user's trust in the application, as the app is perceived to be more reliable.
- Feedback system
The feedback system gives users a simple way to share their experience immediately after interacting with customer support. Each review is tied to the interaction, helping the team identify recurring service issues, improve accountability and understand where the support experience needs to improve.
Before settling on the final feedback experience, I explored two different approaches to understand which interaction felt clearer, faster and more natural for users.
Both directions were designed around the same goal: make it easy for users to rate their customer service experience while still giving them the option to provide more context when needed.
First approach
The first direction used three emotional states, Bad, Okay, and Good, to help users quickly describe their experience. After selecting a rating, users could choose from predefined reasons or leave an additional comment before submitting.
While the interaction felt expressive, the three-option scale was quite limited and could not capture the difference between an average, good or excellent experience. The emojis also introduced more interpretation than necessary, and the follow-up questions made the flow feel heavier for users who only wanted to leave a quick rating.
Second approach
For the second direction, I simplified the experience using a familiar five-star rating system.
Users could rate their experience immediately and submit without going through additional steps. If they wanted to provide more context, they could choose to leave a comment before submitting their feedback.
The five-star system provided a wider rating range, reduced the amount of interpretation required and made the overall interaction feel quicker and more familiar.
Why I moved forward with Flow 2
I chose approach two because it created a better balance between speed and useful feedback. Users could complete the rating in a few seconds, while those who had more to say still had the option to provide additional context.
It also gave the customer service team more granular feedback without making the experience more complicated for the user.
- Improved home screen
The existing homepage felt cluttered, with too many competing features and a navigation structure that made important actions harder to find. This was also reflected in user feedback from the Play Store and social media, where people mentioned difficulty locating key features.
To simplify the experience, I reduced unnecessary elements and reorganised the homepage around the actions users relied on most. This created a clearer hierarchy and made everyday tasks easier to find and complete.
Conclusion
The goal of this project was to create a clearer and more intuitive experience for PalmPay users. From the research and feedback I reviewed, usability and customer experience consistently stood out as areas that needed improvement.
The project focused on simplifying key interactions, improving feature discoverability and creating a more structured experience without removing information users still needed.
One of my biggest takeaways from this project was learning how to solve usability problems, prioritise what mattered most and translate those insights into practical design decisions. It also reinforced the importance of simplifying an experience without stripping away the functionality that makes it useful.