Request Money | Case Study

Project type: UX Design
Role: Designer

In January 2025, we launched a Request Money feature within a well-established money-transfer app used by approximately 2 million users.

The challenge was to introduce a new way of moving money without disrupting the experience users already knew. Every interaction needed to feel familiar while accounting for the constraints and safeguards that come with handling money.

That meant designing beyond the primary flow—considering fraud prevention, edge cases, and the moments where users need clarity before taking action.

Some of the details in these case studies may be vague to protect intellectual property.

The challenge

The goal was to introduce Request Money without sacrificing the patterns and familiarity users already had with the app.

The feature needed to fit naturally within the existing experience while accounting for a range of edge cases around how requests could behave. This included viewing request status and handling fraud prevention, as well as other constraints related to sending and requesting money.

The app also has an older user population that can be particularly susceptible to scams and fraud. That made clarity especially important. The design needed to make potentially important actions and states understandable without adding unnecessary complexity to an experience users were already familiar with.

My role

I worked closely with Product to translate requirements and constraints into a cohesive experience that felt consistent with the existing app. The deliverable: a fully functioning prototype accounting for happy paths and key user flows.

Definition

I came into the early conversations with initial wireframes and began exploring not only the primary request flow, but also the situations around it.

What happens when a request is pending?

What happens when someone declines?

What happens when a user needs to be blocked?

What happens when someone tries to work around the constraints built into the experience?

We needed to design guardrails that accounted for users attempting to work around the system, including request limits and account-blocking mechanisms.

Wireframing & Prototyping

We explored multiple wireframes to understand how Request Money could fit into patterns users already understood when money moved in or out of their account.

A key consideration was making the direction of the action clear: request in, request out.

From there, we explored how notifications and confirmation moments could reinforce what was happening and give users a clearer understanding of the action before completing it.

The confirmation screen became an important part of that experience. Rather than treating it as simply the final step before completing a transaction, we used it as another opportunity to make the action clear and give users confidence in what they were about to do.

We then added actions within our activity tab, allowing users to see their transfers, understand their different statuses, and take action without relying solely on a notification.

This also gave us another opportunity to reinforce an important distinction: seeing a request in the activity tab didn't mean it had already been sent. We differentiated requests, transfers, and payments through visual hierarchy, icons, and labeling. Users still needed to review the information before approving any requests. That distinction helped make the process feel more deliberate and gave users another layer of trust and confidence when interacting with their money.

Testing

After two to three rounds of design and iteration, we arrived at a final prototype that was handed off to the development team and tested in a pilot environment.

The pilot surfaced an important usability issue: users weren't immediately clear on where they could block another user. The functionality existed, but its placement and presentation weren't communicating it clearly enough.

We restructured the layout and improved the labels and visibility of the blocking functionality, making the action easier to find without disrupting the existing experience.

Launch & Impact

The Request Money feature launched in January 2025 with around 402k requests made in it's first 90 days.

Next Steps

Requesting and sending money are ultimately two sides of the same interaction.

As the feature continues to be used, I see an opportunity to give users more flexibility in deciding—or changing—what action they want to take, even at the last second, without disrupting the interaction patterns they're already familiar with.

My next step would be to explore and A/B test variations of the confirmation screen to understand whether changes to its layout could give users more flexibility and clarity without sacrificing the existing experience.