01The product
Axio is a mobile app that combines two things people usually manage separately: tracking everyday spending, and accessing Buy-Now-Pay-Later credit. The PFM side had a loyal base; the BNPL side, recently acquired from Walnut, ran on its own disconnected logic. Customers were using both, but the app didn't know it.
My role was to fold BNPL into the existing PFM experience without customers feeling like they'd landed in a different app — and to use the combined data to make the borrowing experience smarter than a standalone BNPL app could be.
02The problem
Two products, two mental models, one app icon. The PFM and BNPL surfaces had separate navigation logic, separate visual language, and no shared sense of "this is your money, viewed two ways." Customers who wanted to check their budget and use their credit line in the same session had to context-switch like they were using two different apps.
03Process
I ran this as a tight loop: research and stakeholder workshops → user research → feature prioritization → information architecture → wireframes → usability testing → final UI. Nothing moved to high-fidelity until it had been tested in grey boxes first.
Brainstorming with stakeholders
I ran sessions with engineering, product, and marketing to surface constraints early — what BNPL logic could and couldn't change, what compliance required, what marketing needed visible on the home screen. This kept the redesign grounded in what could actually ship, not just what looked good in Figma.
04User research
I ran supervised sessions with existing Axio users to understand how they actually used both halves of the app, and where they got stuck switching between them. Two patterns came up repeatedly: people wanted to see how a BNPL purchase would affect their monthly budget before confirming it, and people didn't trust a "credit score" they couldn't see the logic behind.
Synthesizing the research
I grouped what came out of these sessions into an affinity map, sorting individual pain points into themes rather than treating each complaint as a one-off. Four themes emerged, and each one pointed directly at a decision I'd later make in the IA.
05Information architecture
I restructured the app around four honest jobs: budget visibility on the homepage, spend tracking inside personal finance management, partner discovery in the catalogue, and credit access grouped on its own. The diagram below distinguishes pillars, screens, the actions a user can actually tap, and the points where two pillars cross-link rather than duplicate content.
BNPL was reframed as a feature of your finances, not a separate destination — accessible from the same home screen as your budget, not a different tab with different rules.
06Wireframes & prototypes
I moved into low-fidelity wireframes early so the flow could be challenged before any visual polish made it feel "finished." These covered onboarding, the permission-based home states, the Walnut 369 activation flow, and bill details — built as an interactive prototype to test real taps, not just static screens.
07Usability testing
I ran task-based usability sessions on the wireframe prototype before any visual design began, measuring task success, habit formation, and how the design itself was received.
The BNPL checkout errors were the one real flag — almost all traced back to payment processing rather than the flow itself, which told me the friction was a build issue to hand off, not a design problem to keep iterating on.
08Final design
The final UI leans into Axio's existing dark, confident visual identity, but now speaks one consistent visual language across budgeting and credit. Every BNPL decision point shows its effect on the user's monthly budget inline — no separate screen, no guessing.
09Results & what I learned
The biggest lesson was about scope discipline: it's tempting to redesign everything when you're given the access, but the highest-leverage moves were the smallest ones — surfacing budget impact at the exact moment of a credit decision, not redesigning screens nobody was confused by. Good UX research tells you where not to spend your time as much as where to spend it.