Case Study · HALA Payments · 2025

Expense
Management

Untangling a broken platform for the people who run Saudi businesses
Company
HALA Payments
Role
Senior Product Designer
Year
2025 — Present
Methods
User Interviews · Workflow Analysis · Design Principles
Impact
Faster Onboarding · Fewer Errors · Stakeholder Buy-in
↑SpeedFaster onboarding & task completion
↓ErrorsReduced support tickets & user errors
3TypesUser groups served in one unified platform
Context

HALA & the opportunity

HALA Payments is a fast-growing Saudi fintech providing payment and financial management solutions for SMBs across the Kingdom. As the company scaled, its expense management platform hadn't kept pace — and the cracks were beginning to show.

I joined as Senior Product Designer with a mandate to lead a comprehensive revamp: audit what existed, understand who was actually using it, and redesign the core experience from the ground up.

🏢
The Platform

An expense management tool serving SMB owners, finance teams, accountants, and operations managers — each with very different mental models and workflows.

⚡
The Stakes

Financial tools demand trust and clarity above all else. A confusing or inconsistent experience doesn't just frustrate users — it erodes confidence in the product itself.

🎯
My Role

End-to-end ownership: defining experience principles, running user research, redesigning core flows, and aligning Product and Engineering around a shared design direction.

Who We're Designing For

Three users.
One platform.

The platform served users with fundamentally different goals, technical fluency, and tolerance for complexity. Designing for all three without alienating any was the central design challenge.

👔
SMB Owners & Finance Teams

Need visibility and control over company spending — quickly, with minimal friction.

Overwhelmed by complex navigation and unclear data hierarchy.
📒
Accountants & Bookkeepers

Power users who need precision, detailed filters, and reliable exports.

Inconsistent UI broke their workflow rhythm.
⚙️
Operations Managers

Need to manage employee cards, set limits, and approve requests — often on the go.

Broken onboarding made initial setup confusing and time-consuming.
Problem Definition

Three problems
breaking the experience

"The platform has the right features — but users can't find them, can't trust them, and can't get started without help. We're losing confidence at every touchpoint."

01.
Inconsistent UI

Components, patterns, and language varied wildly — a symptom of years of piecemeal feature additions with no unifying design language. Every screen felt unfamiliar.

02.
Complex, Unclear Flows

Core tasks required too many steps, with unclear hierarchy and no wayfinding. Users frequently got lost, generating errors and support requests.

03.
Broken Onboarding

New users arrived with no orientation. Many needed hand-holding from support just to get started — an expensive and unscalable problem.

Research & Discovery

Understanding before designing

01
User Interviews Across All Three Groups

Conducted in-depth interviews using a jobs-to-be-done framework. Key themes: desire for speed, fear of financial errors, and frustration with re-learning the product constantly.

02
Workflow Analysis & Journey Mapping

Mapped real end-to-end workflows for each user type. Identified exact points of friction, confusion, and abandonment — giving Design, Product, and Engineering a shared language.

03
Stakeholder Alignment Workshops

Facilitated workshops with PMs and Engineering leads to present findings, prioritise problems by user impact and business value, and build shared ownership of the design direction.

Design Principles

The foundation
everything was built on

Before touching any UI, I defined four experience principles — a north star for every design decision, shared with and agreed upon by the full product team.

01
Clarity over Completeness

Show users what they need right now. Progressive disclosure over information overload. Every screen should have one clear primary action.

02
Trust Through Consistency

In financial products, inconsistency breeds doubt. Every component, pattern, and language must feel like one system — building the confidence users need to act.

03
Guided, Not Gatekept

Onboarding should orient, not overwhelm. Users should always know where they are, what to do next, and what happens when they do it.

04
Designed for All Three

One system, many contexts — respecting the different mental models of all user types simultaneously.

Before & After

The dashboard,
transformed

The before/after tells the story clearly — from a dense, heavy interface that competed for attention on every pixel, to a clean, trustworthy dashboard that puts the right information front and centre.

Before Original dashboard
HALA dashboard before redesign
Heavy black sidebar dominated visual weight
Cluttered top bar — language switcher, dark mode, too many controls
Repeated suspended card states created visual noise
No clear hierarchy — everything competed equally
Dense, hard to scan at a glance
After Redesigned dashboard · 2025
HALA dashboard after redesign
Clean white sidebar — lighter, more focused
Streamlined nav — fewer distractions, clearer wayfinding
Balance prominently featured with clear actions
Pending requests surfaced — most urgent task visible immediately
Trustworthy, professional feel — right for a financial product

"Before the redesign, I'd get a call from at least one new customer every week who couldn't figure out how to set up their account. That basically stopped."

— HALA Customer Success Team

Design Decisions

What we changed
and why

01
Unified Design Language

Established a consistent component library and visual system — standardising typography, colour, spacing, and interactive patterns. The product now feels like one product, not a patchwork of features.

02
Core Flow Redesign

Rebuilt primary workflows from scratch. Reduced step counts, clarified hierarchy, added contextual wayfinding — validated with usability testing before handoff.

03
Onboarding Reimagined

Designed a progressive onboarding experience that introduced users in context — each step purposeful, in plain language, rewarded with visible progress.

04
Cross-Functional Alignment

Weekly syncs, annotated specs, and an open Figma workspace — by the time designs were ready to build, the team had been part of the thinking. Fewer surprises. Faster builds.

Outcomes

A platform people
actually trust now

↑Speed
Faster Onboarding

New users complete setup significantly faster — with no support intervention required.

↓Errors
Reduced Support Load

Fewer support tickets and user errors — a direct result of clearer flows, better wayfinding, and a consistent UI that builds user confidence.

✓Trust
Stakeholder Buy-in

Positive feedback from users and internal stakeholders. The design principles became the shared language for ongoing product decisions.

Reflections

What I took away

01
Principles before pixels.

Defining shared experience principles before designing a single screen was the most valuable thing I did. It aligned the team and gave everyone a shared language for decision-making.

02
Serving multiple users isn't about compromise — it's about architecture.

The challenge was structural before it was visual. Good information architecture served all three users without compromising any.

03
In fintech, trust is the product.

Every inconsistency chips away at trust. Design in financial products carries real weight — and that responsibility makes the work meaningful.

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