PayMe: Digital wallet Redesign
Reimagining Hong Kong's favorite payments app
team
PayMe
Role
UI Lead
As UI Lead for PayMe from HSBC, I led an 8-person design team through a full redesign of Hong Kong's first and largest P2P payments app. I built the design system from scratch, aligned C-suite, product, and engineering, and shipped an experience that grew PayMe from 1M to 2M users, a 4.6/5 App Store rating, and 70%+ P2P market share in HK.
The redesign accelerated growth so significantly that the next million users came in just 8 months, versus 15 for the first.
8 mos
1M → 2M users
time To double users
70%
of Hong Kong
p2p market share
4.6/5
(250k reviews)
APP STORE RATING
Key PayMe screens: Discover, Pay, My Transactions
Swipe from the Discover tab to seamlessly pay friends
Or share their PayCode for Merchants to scan and pay
PROBLEM & opportunity
Growth without a solid foundation
After reaching 1 million users in just 15 months, PayMe's MVP was showing its limits. The "social payments" model that worked in the West clashed with Hong Kong's deeply private relationship with money. Daily engagement was declining, users were confused by public transactions, and the interface felt dated and too corporate.
The opportunity was clear: rebuild PayMe on a scalable design system, restructure the IA around users' top actions, and craft an experience rooted in local culture. Made for Hong Kong, by Hong Kong.
Key PayMe screens (Before)
Key PayMe screens (After)
Ways to pay (Before)
Ways to pay (After)
My role
Building the team, owning the system
When I joined PayMe, I inherited one Senior UI Designer and a 100% consultant team who departed within weeks of my arrival. I rebuilt the design function from the ground up into an 8-person team across UI and UX disciplines, while simultaneously leading the redesign.
I built PayMe's first foundational design system, establishing the visual language, component library, and design values that governed all product work going forward.
I defined the core design values – Social, Simple, Delightful, Young, Focused – as the strategic filter for every design decision, led all UI design direction across the full app, and partnered with UX, CX, copywriting, POs, and engineering to deliver to market.
Refreshed and delightful set of icons and illustrations
process
From research to redesign
Research surfaced three key insight themes that shaped every design decision:
Users didn't feel the app was made for them culturally
Money is a deeply private matter in HK making "social payments" a cultural misfit
MVP experience was clunky and friction-heavy
From those insights I drove a complete IA restructure to surface the top four actions – Pay a Business, Scan to Pay, Pay, Request – reducing key flows from 3-4 taps down to one.
I applied a "one task at a time" philosophy across every flow, introduced modular design for scalability, and developed a culturally rooted visual language with custom iconography and illustrations specific to Hong Kong.
Consolidated PaySheet holds the 4 core actions
Pay favorite friends straight from the main Discover tab
*Cannot show full details due to NDA
Design at city scale
Made for Hong Kong
PayMe wasn't just scrutinized within HSBC but across the entire city of Hong Kong. Driving alignment across C-suite, engineers, compliance, and external stakeholders was as much the job as the design itself.
PayMe didn't just grow. It became woven into how Hong Kong lives. Building the design system and team that made that possible was the real work.