Client
Dummy Project
Year
2024
Duration
2 weeks
Stack
Figma
Deliverables
high-fidelity UI designs, CRM dashboard UI, data visualization components, workflow management screens, cloud background visuals, design system
The Problem
Young adults sharing housing in cities like Lagos regularly split rent, utilities, groceries, and social costs, but have no structured way to plan or manage those contributions collectively. Instead they rely on WhatsApp threads, manual bank transfers, memory, and individual tracking — a fragile system that breaks down often. The deeper issue isn't late payments; it's the social discomfort and coordination friction that surrounds shared money. Asking someone to contribute feels confrontational, reminders read as accusatory, and organizers absorb most of the administrative burden while everyone else lacks visibility into what's actually been collected.
Why Existing Tools Fail
Splitwise, Venmo, and Cash App move money efficiently but are reactive by design — they tell users who owes what after expenses have already occurred, leaving the actual coordination to happen elsewhere, through messaging apps, manual reminders, and personal tracking. None of them address the planning, accountability, or transparency that group finances actually require, and none reduce the social friction that makes people avoid asking for money from friends in the first place.
The Insight
Shared expenses are fundamentally coordination problems, not payment problems. Payment is rarely the hard part — coordinating people with different financial habits and reminding them without damaging the relationship is.
The Opportunity
This reframed the brief around a single question: how might groups coordinate and manage collective contributions in a way that feels as natural as a group conversation, but as reliable as a financial tool? It set four design principles for everything that followed — reduce social friction, increase transparency, encourage accountability without blame, and mirror financial behaviors already familiar in Nigerian culture, like ajo and informal group savings.
Structuring the Solution
I grounded the solution in three real scenarios — a founder juggling investors, clients, and a small team across email and Slack; a freelance designer managing five clients at once; a consultant fielding upwards of a hundred emails a day, most irrelevant to their immediate priorities. These informed a navigation structure built around three pillars: a daily brief, tools to act on messages directly, and a unified workspace bringing every connected source into one place. From there I mapped the full information architecture and user flow, from onboarding through to acting on an item in the brief, giving the product a clear structural logic before any screen was designed.
Design Approach
I built the foundational design system first — typography, color, spacing, border radii, and reusable components — to ensure consistency across the product, then moved from sketches through wireframes into high-fidelity screens and interactive prototypes. Two decisions shaped the product most: smart, automated reminders to remove the most socially uncomfortable task in the whole experience, and a collective fund model rather than traditional expense-splitting, which aligned more naturally with ajo-style group saving behavior already familiar to Nigerian users.
The Outcome
The result is Paayre, a social fintech product structured around four core sections — Home, Groups, Wallet, and Profile — where every feature traces back to a specific user need, with nothing added arbitrarily and nothing essential left out.
What It Solves
Paayre replaces the fragile, informal system of WhatsApp threads, manual transfers, and memory with a single structured flow: contributions are visible to the whole group in real time, reminders are automated rather than personal, and organizers no longer carry the full administrative and emotional weight of chasing people for money. What used to require constant manual follow-up now happens through the product itself.
Scope
As a self-directed concept project, this wasn't measured against live usage — but the system was built with the same rigor as a shipped product: 11 high-fidelity screens spanning onboarding, the daily brief, workspace views across three integrated channels, and message-level detail, all governed by a single design system.
Scope
Paayre wasn't built to digitize how people already manage shared expenses — it was designed to replace that system entirely with something more structured, transparent, and attuned to the social dynamics that make group money management difficult. In a context like Lagos, where informal financial collaboration is already deeply embedded but poorly supported by digital tools, that represents a considered, well-researched intervention rather than a feature exercise.