Rebuilding Stellas' Transfer Flow

Stellas is a digital challenger bank built for Nigerians at home and in the UK, one of the few fintech products where a single “send money” action can mean rent, school fees, or a parent’s hospital bill. The stakes for getting transfer right weren’t abstract.

Before the redesign, the transfer flow had a 75% transaction success rate (one in four transfers didn’t complete cleanly) and 40% of users reported dissatisfaction with the feature in our surveys. Support tickets were dominated by reversal requests and “where is my money” confusion.

I led product design on a ten-person cross-functional team: two backend engineers, a mobile developer, DevOps, QA, product owner, product manager, data analyst, and marketing, with me owning the end-to-end design of the flow.

Before touching pixels

I combined three inputs: the analytics funnel, a mixed research pool of 30 active users across interviews and surveys, and a read-through of the last 90 days of support tickets alongside the Customer Support team. Three patterns kept repeating:

That gave us a specific design target: make amount entry feel deliberate, unhurried, and bank-grade. Not faster. Slower in the right places.

The slider

My initial solve was a slider-based amount picker with preset values (₦10k, ₦20k, ₦30k, ₦40k…) and a double-tap-to-edit fallback for custom amounts. The theory was legitimate: a slider forces a physical gesture tied to the value, which should make a user feel the number rather than just type it, reducing the “I meant ₦10,000, not ₦100,000” class of mistake. Presets would also speed up the most common transfer sizes.

Alongside the input, I set explicit targets with the PM before we shipped: lift the transaction success rate from 75% to 90%, and drop the dissatisfaction rate from 40% to below 10%. We shipped the slider in 2021.

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The honest part: it failed

Two weeks after rollout, the data came back brutal:

I had mistaken novelty for deliberateness. The slider made users feel like they were making a decision, but it gave them a control that was less precise than a keypad, in a context (money) where precision matters more than anything. The gesture I was trying to create, a pause before sending, turned into a guess.

It’s not a comfortable part to show in a portfolio. But it’s the one I learned most from: the difference between a design decision that feels smart and a design decision that actually protects the user.

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Inverting the hierarchy

V2 shipped in 2022 and inverted the hierarchy. Instead of a slider with presets as the primary input, the new design made direct text entry the primary input, with quick-select chips (₦10,000 · ₦100,000 · ₦1,000,000) as assistive shortcuts below. Users could type any amount precisely, or tap a preset for the common cases, but the preset was no longer the default path. The “Proceed” CTA stayed disabled until all mandatory fields were filled, and Ghost Mode (Stellas’ anonymous-transfer feature) was preserved as a toggle.

Accessibility-wise, we held to the same standards we apply across every flow; nothing unique to call out here. The problem wasn’t an accessibility gap, it was an input-precision gap.

The design worked because the slowness now lived at the confirm step, where users wanted it, not at the input step, where they wanted speed with accuracy.

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The slider was a lesson in mistaking the feel of a decision for the fact of one. Users don’t want a design to perform care for them; they want the interaction to make the right outcome the easy one. On any high-stakes input now (money, irreversible actions, account changes) I default to friction at the confirm step, not friction at the input.