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Wave lets small business owners create invoices, accept online payments,
and make accounting easy—all in one place.
0-1
UX/UI
Prototyping
Mobile App
Web

The Problem

Small business owners face daily friction managing their finances across scattered tools, leading to slow payments and limited control over their cash flow. Many only use one part of Wave, missing out on the benefits of a connected experience.

  • Juggling disconnected financial tools
  • Delays in getting paid
  • Limited control over cash flow

Strategy & Design Approach

My team focused on three OKRs: modernize mobile tools, drive payment adoption, and explore new products that solve deeper financial needs. This meant redesigning key apps, running experiments, and incubating new revenue ideas.

The Solution

Streamline financial workflows & UX

  • Revamp Invoice and Receipts apps into a cohesive experience
  • Unify mobile patterns using Wave’s Buoyant design system
  • Deeper integrations with core accounting system

Tools to help operators get paid faster

  • Experimentations to increase adoption of Wave’s payments rail
  • Integrate payment setup and nudges directly into invoicing flows
  • Simplified decision points to reduce friction from invoice to payment

More control over cash flow

  • Explored early concepts for a POS Terminal and Invoice Advances
  • Shaped the design strategy for credit and loan products
  • Introduce patterns to help users track and access cash more easily

Invoice & Receipts App Redesign

Redesigned both apps to deliver a modern, unified experience—making it easier for users to track income and expenses on the go.

Cross Platform Mobile Components

Invoice by Wave

Main interface focused on viewing invoice and payment statuses.
“Quickview” drawer offered at-a-glance info and contextual actions.
Full customization required feature parity with the web version.
Android design was based heavily on Material 2.
A Bottom Nav variation was used instead of iOS’s drawer pattern.
Using React Native allowed for precise, designer-driven UI.

Receipts by Wave

The Receipts app followed design patterns from the Invoice app.
Native UI patterns eased user adoption of new Wave tools.
The long-term goal was to build a toolset that simplifies bookkeeping.

Growth Design for Invoice Payments

Led experiments that improved adoption of Wave’s built-in payments, helping users get paid faster with less friction.

Variant A‍

Toggle-on Rate: 28.2%
p=0.018 (Winner)

Experiment:

Invoice Payment Toggle Placement Test

My team hypothesized that small business owners were less likely to turn on invoice payments when the toggle was buried in account settings (Control). This meant missed opportunities to get paid faster.

I designed several potential approaches to understand how the visibility of this setting impacts payments enablement. Variant A, which surfaced the toggle at the end of the workflow, led to a 14% increase in payments being turned on—helping business owners more easily collect payments from their customers.

Control‍

Toggle-on Rate: 24.8%

Control‍

Toggle-on Rate: 24.8%

Variant B

Toggle-on Rate: 22.0%
p=0.042 (worse than control)

Variant B

Toggle-on Rate: 22.0%
p=0.042 (worse than control)

Variant C

Toggle-on Rate: 24.5%
p=0.72 (no difference)

Variant C

Toggle-on Rate: 24.5%
p=0.72 (no difference)

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0–1 New Revenue Opportunities

Explored new product directions—like a Payments app, lending tools, and credit promotions—to support small business cash flow and revenue growth.

Opportunity:

Enable point-of-sale purchases

To explore new revenue streams, we built a point-of-sale proof of concept enabling small businesses to collect in-person payments via a mobile terminal and web-based checkout.

We launched the web checkout in beta and monitored adoption and performance. Based on usage patterns, we prioritized enhancements to the checkout flow and ultimately deferred building a full virtual terminal due to low demand—allowing us to stay focused on higher-impact opportunities.

After experimenting with Framer and Origami, I chose to create the proof of concept using Axure. We needed a tool that offered the flexibility and control to build a functional 'no-code' prototype, and at the time, Axure fit the bill. (Today, there are tools like "Lovable" that can create close-to production ready quality prototypes.)

We envisioned the Virtual Terminal as part of the Invoice app to streamline payments.

We envisioned the Virtual Terminal as part of the Invoice app to streamline payments.

We use off-the-shelf components when possible—like this React Native card scanner.

We use off-the-shelf components when possible—like this React Native card scanner.

Established mobile design patterns let us focus on business problems first.

Established mobile design patterns let us focus on business problems first.

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