Vama
2024 – 2025 / iOS, Android & Desktop App
/ Background
Vama is an integrated payments and communication platform, redefining convenience and productivity for modern digital communities.
It aims to be an all-in-one solution that enhances collaboration, accelerates transactions, and creates a frictionless and emotionally-conscious user experience.
/ My Role
As the product designer, I was doing end-to-end design for multiple feature domains within the product
As the design systems lead, I was leading the creation, maintenance, and growth of the design system, as well as coordinating communication between design and development (My DS work is available here as part of another page)
Problems in payments now:
Across people’s day-to-day lives, they frequently coordinate shared expenses like meals and rides in their chats. But when it comes time to settle up or pay, they are forced to change apps to complete the transaction elsewhere. This breaks the flow, creates friction, and leads to user drop-off at a critical engagement point.
We saw an opportunity to close this gap by embedding lightweight, essential money tools directly into the messaging experience. The goal was simple: help users take action while the intent is still fresh, without needing to disrupt the conversation.
Our lean UX approach:
With a tight timeline for the initial MVP rollout, as well as lack of existing proprietary data, we adopted a lean and pragmatic UX process focused on identifying usability friction early and validating our core assumptions quickly to drive the initial design processes
Key research methods:
/ Heuristic analysis of existing fintech and peer payment tools to understand standard UX patterns and friction points, with strong regional focus for demographic-targeting
/ Targeted usability testing of key flows, including KYC, bank linking, and peer transactions
/ Internal dogfooding to simulate real-life use cases like bill splitting and casual send/request interactions
This approach gave us the directional confidence to launch a usable foundation, while leaving space for deeper iteration based on real-world usage data and feedback post-launch
Initial learnings and insights:
/ Dislike of complex UI, users prefer convenient and intuitive flows
/ Familiarity drives easier and higher consumption rate
/ Prefers centralized control and access when it comes to funds
/ Prefer stronger and more visible security measures when it comes to funds and transactions
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
Core MVP wallet experience:
/ To drive initial adoption and build user confidence, we designed the MVP experience to be familiar, clear, and accessible
With functioning 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 learnings:
/ While the wallet lives in a separate tab, users expect to initiate money actions from within the chat itself. Embedding send/request inside chat bubbles reinforces immediacy but visibility and timing are critical
/ KYC and Plaid flows require strong signals of safety and clarity. Features like progress indicators, staged steps, and simplified copy greatly increased user confidence in our tests
/ Users are open to moving between chat and wallet as long as the transition is short, intuitive, and clearly tied to their previous action. Seamless handoff between contexts improves adoption
Future success metrics:
Following the MVP launch, our goal will be to reduce transactional friction and improve engagement during key money moments. To do so we will be measuring the following metrics from our usage data:
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.