Vama
2024 – 2025 / iOS, Android & Desktop App
/ Background
Vama is an integrated payments and communication platform, redefining convenience and productivity for modern digital communities.
/ My Role
As a Senior Product Designer at Vama, I led end-to-end design for in-chat payment and chat features across iOS, Android, and desktop. The goal was to reduce friction in everyday peer-to-peer payments by enabling users to send and request money without leaving conversations - a core engagement and trust challenge for the product.
I owned discovery, UX strategy, and feature design for Vama’s global experience, including wallet activation, send/request flows, and KYC onboarding. I worked closely with product, engineering, and compliance partners, while also architecting the Vama Design System to ensure consistency across platforms.
Problems in payments now:
Users often coordinated shared expenses in chat, but completing payments required switching to separate apps. This context switch broke conversational momentum, increased friction at high-intent moments, and led to drop-off during payment completion - directly impacting engagement and trust within Vama.
Our lean UX approach:
Due to MVP timelines and limited proprietary data, we adopted a lean UX approach. I relied on heuristic analysis, targeted usability testing (bank linking and KYC), and internal dogfooding to quickly validate assumptions and de-risk critical flows before launch.
Through testing and internal validation, a few themes emerged:
/ Simplicity mattered more than flexibility; complex UI reduced confidence
/ Familiar payment patterns increased trust and speed
/ Users preferred a single, centralised place to manage money rather than fragmented flows
Lightweight MVP first:
Based off the initial research, we aimed to have the initial release be focused on building initial engagement and adoption momentum, laying the groundwork for a richer, more connected financial layer in the future.
Thus we designed and shipped a more standalone and lightweight wallet experience first, to serve the baseline peer-to-peer use cases first, providing a seamless and approachable experience adding on to the currently-messaging-first platform
With functional flows created, we ran concurrent additional internal testing during implementation phase to gain further insights that guide us on making both immediate and future potential updates to our features
Pre-launch testing showed that embedding payment actions in chat increased immediacy, but required clearer feedback around timing and state. We also saw improved KYC completion when progress and outcomes were explicitly communicated, reinforcing the importance of transparency in trust-sensitive flows.
Future success metrics:
While still early, this work validated in-chat payments as a viable core interaction model for Vama. To guide iteration and measure adoption post-launch, we defined clear success metrics:
Wallet activation rate:
/ % of users completing KYC and linking accounts after discovering wallet features
Chat-to-wallet action rate:
/ Volume of send/request/split flows initiated from chat vs via the wallet tab
Drop-off rate after money talk:
/ Reduction in users exiting the app after discussing expenses or payments
Peer transaction frequency:
/ Growth in weekly active peer-to-peer money transfers
Group bill-split usage:
/ Adoption and frequency of cost-splitting tools within group chats
These quantitative metrics alongside qualitative usage patterns will guide our next iterations as we work toward a unified conversational-financial experience that’s intuitive, trustworthy, and fully embedded in the way users already communicate.
Reflections to look forward:
This project reinforced the importance of reducing friction at high-intent moments and using familiar patterns to build trust, particularly in regulated product spaces like payments.
Chat and payments are only the beginning, there are definitely further surfaces that can be better integrated to further improve the experience of the modern digital users.