Paymenow is Africa's leading Earned Wage Access (EWA) platform, with a mission to bring financial peace of mind to everyone, everywhere by providing employees early access to already earned wages. The company's SaaS product aims to educate users on how to transition from debt and living paycheck to paycheck to becoming investors, while also encouraging responsible financial behavior and saving through a mobile app or browser – data-free. Paymenow integrates with employers' payroll systems and offers employees an earned wage access solution that allows them to access a predetermined percentage of their salary before payday. Based in South Africa, Paymenow is used by over 120,000 employees from all over Africa.

The company faced the challenge of making its SaaS platform accessible to all employees, which required a complete rewrite of the front-end to make it platform-agnostic. Paymenow also wanted to refresh the visual design of the app to highlight its unique value proposition and improve the user experience. With a goal to increase current usage to 400,000 employees and a futuristic outlook of one million users, Paymenow needed to make sure the visual identity refresh resonated with its potential user base and every stage of the users' interactive experience across registration, usage satisfaction, and engagement.

At Curva, we are a team of distributed remote talents, however fostering a collaborative environment for our clients is our top priority. With the Paymenow team, we introduced the User Interaction Map (UIM) workshop to drive collaboration and clearly discuss our proposed improvements to user experience. Following alignments on the UIM and information architecture, we created wireframes to visualise our ideas and ensure we were truly aligned with their product's vision.Understanding the visual approach with the wireframes we had created, we clearly knew what was required to create a comprehensive design system for the engineering team to achieve success in rewriting the app with Flutter to drive accessibility on mobile apps and web browsers. We ensured that the brand refresh we had developed was applied to the app screens by using the new fonts, custom illustrations, and icons to reiterate the product vision and brand identity while creating the high fidelity designs.

Targeted brand refresh

Given the audience for whom the Paymenow app is intended, most of the everyday apps used by blue collar employees are social platforms; thus, we needed to create a brand identity revamp that resonates with the type of well-communicated and illustrated patterns adopted by these apps. We first retouched the logo to eliminate constraints induced by gradients, making it into a 2-colour responsive vector logomark that improves its usability across digital and print media. We then introduced a new font family that gives the brand its unique personality. We added a new palette and created custom illustrations and icons to help instill play and delight in the app, with a goal to increase usability and retention.

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User registration and onboarding

A scalable, more inclusive, and consistent onboarding experience for Paymenow users was critical. Their onboarding flow was tailored to the South African market at the time, and with the mission of expanding across the African continent, this needed to be improved to drive acquisition from across the continent. We mapped out the current user flow with the team's assistance, explaining the whys and whats of every information collected, and we took that into account when creating a refreshed registration and onboarding experience, which improved the quality of data collected and gave users enough information to seamlessly complete the onboarding process with a sufficient understanding of the benefits.

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Simplified dashboard & navigation

Following the redesign of the app's information architecture to improve the usability of the Paymenow product, we enhanced the dashboard's visual aesthetics and functionality to simplify user data and foster better navigation. We implemented a bottom navigation to better introduce users to all of the product features available to improve their financial wellness and inclusiveness. Features such as budgeting, credit score checking, and financial education became more visible to users, thus increasing adoption and usage.

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Gamification

The Paymenow gamification intentions were greatly improved and infused throughout the app, from onboarding to completing the financial education modules, in order to drive engagement and adoption of certain app features. The Paymenow app works in Tiers, and the higher a user’s tier, the more earned wages they are eligible to cash out. We influenced the gamification success by progressively disclosing features and adopting conversational design to simplify the experience.

Using the UIM technique, we improved team collaboration. We also discovered that the engineering team achieved development success with the design system created. Finally, we discovered that designing for business value and impact is a team sport that is central to Curva's value and services.