Dyme Mobile App Design
Mohammed Alyazji
In this case study, I’ll take you behind the scenes of the Dyme app design — from early research and strategy to crafting a seamless user experience that blends digital payments with the power of blockchain.
🕐 Timeline: 12 weeks. || 💳 Industry: Fintech. ||📍 Location: Tanzania.
💻 Tools: Figma, FigJam, Notion, Jitter, Google.
🧠 Overview
Dyme is a mobile application that enables users to pay, get paid, shop, split, and share with peers in a friendly and intuitive experience — all powered by stablecoin technology, making transactions faster, cheaper, and more accessible.
Dyme Mobile App UI Snapshot.
🎯 Role & Responsibilities
As a Product Designer, I led the full design process for Dyme, from research and strategy to interface design and developer handoff. My role combined both strategic thinking and hands-on execution to shape an accessible and scalable digital payment experience.
UX Researcher & Strategist: Defined the project direction by analyzing client materials, validating assumptions, and conducting user research through interviews and surveys.
UX Designer: Created the UCD canvas, affinity diagrams, and user story maps to align business goals with user needs. Designed user flows and task analyses.
UI Designer:
Designed wireframes, style guides, and high-fidelity UI screens. Built a modular component library in Figma to ensure scalability and design consistency.
Brand Designer:
Designed Dyme’s logo and visual identity, which will be introduced in a separate branding showcase.
🧩 The Challenge:
In Tanzania, mobile money dominates daily transactions, yet users continue to face high fees, limited interoperability, and friction from unreliable network coverage. Combined with fraud risks, low financial literacy, and the complexity of on/off ramps and long wallet addresses, these issues create barriers that prevent seamless digital payments and often push users back to cash.
🎯 The Goal:
Design a simple, low-cost, and trustworthy payment experience that removes these frictions while keeping the process familiar and intuitive for everyday Tanzanian users.
🔄 Design Process
The design process for Dyme followed a user-centered and iterative approach, starting from understanding the market and users, then moving through defining, ideating, designing, and finally delivering a complete and scalable solution.
Design Process
Phase 1: Discover
Before moving into design, I focused on deeply understanding Dyme’s goals, its users, and the market context. This stage helped align every decision with both user needs and business objectives.
🎯 1. Building Understanding
I began by analyzing the client’s pitch deck and documentation to clarify the product vision and identify the main challenges in mobile payments — including high transaction fees, fragmented systems, and limited interoperability.
🤔 2. Validating Assumptions
Based on early discussions with the client and an initial review of Dyme’s concept, we outlined a set of key assumptions to better understand the financial and behavioral challenges users face with existing payment systems.
High Transaction Fees – Traditional money transfers involve high service charges that discourage frequent use.
Complex On/Off Ramps – Converting between fiat and crypto (and vice versa) requires lengthy KYC processes that intimidate everyday users.
Cross-Border Challenges: International transfers are often slow, costly, and lack transparency or security.
Difficulty Splitting Costs – Users struggle to manage shared payments digitally for everyday activities such as travel or dining.
Unmemorable Blockchain Addresses – Long, complex wallet addresses make peer-to-peer payments prone to errors and unfriendly.
These assumptions guided my early research direction and were later tested through interviews and surveys.
📋 3. User-Centered Design Canvas
I created a User-Centered Design (UCD) Canvas to connect user needs, business goals, and product success metrics — forming a shared reference for decision-making across the team.
User-Centered Design Canvas
📝 4. User Research
I conducted user interviews and surveys to gather insights on people’s behavior with mobile payments — exploring their frustrations, trust factors, and expectations for a crypto-powered platform.
These insights were later analyzed and used to define user personas and guide the next design stages.
Snapshot of Survey's Questions
📈 5. Competitive Analysis
As part of the research phase, I conducted a detailed analysis of existing mobile payment experiences, focusing on core features, user flows, and interaction patterns.
This helped identify usability gaps and improvement opportunities for Dyme — particularly in simplifying transaction journeys, enhancing peer interactions, and creating a more engaging, social flow across key app features.
Compatitors Task Flow Analysis
Compatitive Features Analysis
Phase 2: Define
In this stage, I translated the collected research data into clear insights and design direction. The goal was to define the core problem and ensure that every design decision stayed aligned with user needs. This phase included activities such as:
1. Synthesizing Insights (Affinity Diagram)
I organized all gathered data into an Affinity Diagram to visually cluster key insights under four main categories:
Frustrations – recurring pain points around fees, accessibility, and usability.
Needs – user expectations and functional gaps.
Quotes – direct user statements reflecting emotions and motivations.
Competitors – references to existing product behaviors and opportunities for improvement.
Affinity Diagram
2. Research Findings
💬 2.1 Interview Insights
Mobile Money is the most common daily transfer method.
People usually transact for sending money, shopping, or sharing group expenses.
Services are limited regionally and not supported for online purchases.
Users face challenges like high fees, lack of request features, and no way to split costs.
🗣️ 2.2 Key Quotes
“I wish I could buy things as easily as I do with mobile money technology, but on a wider or global scale.”
“I would really wish to have an application that allows me to manage my transaction history better.”
📊 2.3 Survey Highlights
The majority of users (97%) are from Tanzania, mostly aged 18–25.
89% use mobile money apps, and 60% perform 8+ transactions monthly.
High transaction fees ranked as the top frustration (88.6%).
Users value ease of use, lower fees, and faster processes above all.
Survey's Results
👤 2.4 User Persona
Based on the interview and survey findings, I created a primary persona representing Dyme’s core target user. This persona helped guide every design decision and ensured the product stayed focused on real user needs and behaviors.
User Persona
🎯 2.5. Key Takeaways
Users prioritize speed, simplicity, and affordability.
There’s high interest in global interoperability and transparent transactions.
A social and familiar interface could help bridge trust gaps in blockchain payments.
Phase 3: Ideate
After defining the problem and understanding user needs, I moved into the Ideation phase, where the focus shifted to translating insights into functional and user-centered solutions.
This stage aimed to explore and organize ideas in a way that clearly connects user goals with product functionality.
🧩 1. User Story Mapping
After defining Dyme’s core features — including Send, Request, Cash in, Cash out, Split Costs, Exchange, Social Activities, etc. I created a User Story Map to visualize the entire user journey and prioritize what truly matters to users.
This helped organize the product scope by:
Prioritizing features based on user value and frequency of use.
Structuring user journeys across different user types (users, agents, merchants).
Identifying dependencies and potential UX bottlenecks early.
User Story Mapping
🔄 2. User Flows
Once the stories and features were mapped, I developed detailed User Flows for each main feature of the Dyme app. Each flow was designed to:
Minimize cognitive load and reduce steps per task.
Maintain visual and behavioral consistency across modules.
Anticipate different user scenarios and edge cases (e.g., failed transactions, pending requests).
A Snapshot of Userflows
Phase 4: Design
With the user flows and feature priorities defined, I moved into the Design phase, where the focus was on shaping Dyme’s visual identity and translating ideas into a clear, consistent interface.
📱 1. Wireframing
I began by designing high-fidelity wireframes instead of traditional low-fidelity sketches.
This approach allowed me to explore both structure and visual direction simultaneously, while enabling early testing and prototyping to validate usability and interaction flow.
A Snapshot of Wireframes
👀 2. Moodboard
Before moving into the visual design, I created a Moodboard to establish the overall UI direction of Dyme.
🎨 Visual Design
This phase focused on translating Dyme’s identity into a cohesive digital experience — bringing together branding, style guide, iconography, UI components, micro-interactions, and final interface designs.
Brand Identity x Style Guide
Dyme's Homepage Mockup
Send Money Flow
Expenses History
Groups and Split Cost
Dyme's Cards
🏁 Conclusion
Designing Dyme was an end-to-end journey — from shaping the brand identity to building a complete, user-centered mobile experience. Through research, strategy, and thoughtful design, the goal was to create a product that makes digital payments simple, social, and trustworthy.
This project reflects how a clear visual system, seamless interactions, and human-centered thinking can come together to turn complex fintech experiences into something approachable and engaging.
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Posted Oct 21, 2025
As mobile payments continue to grow across Africa, users still face high fees, fragmented systems, and limited access across different service providers.
