Designing a scalable payment experience across Southeast Asia
ShopeePay and AirPay were operating as separate products across six countries. I led the end-to-end design of a unified Scan & Pay experience that could scale across all markets while accommodating local requirements and business priorities.
Sole Product Designer
End-to-end (Research → UX Strategy → System Design → Delivery)
ShopeePay operated across six Southeast Asian markets — each with its own payment infrastructure, compliance requirements, and user expectations. The existing designs were fragmented and difficult to maintain.
I conducted a thorough competitor analysis across all six markets — examining how local and regional payment apps handle scan-to-pay flows, amount entry, confirmation steps, and promotion display. This helped identify patterns worth adopting and pitfalls to avoid.
The level of payment complexity directly shapes the UX structure in various countries. This insight informed how we structured flexibility in our design.
The combination of these differences will affect the final design of an app.
For example:
Wechat Pay have several payment methods, so it better separate input and payment methods in different steps.
Grab Pay just support 1 payment method here, so it can contain all features in same page.
We created two design variations and tested them with 10 users from diverse backgrounds.
* The links are not publicly available due to privacy restrictions
We conducted in-store testing in shopping malls and interviewed both users and merchants.
Key learnings:
After receiving feedback, I discovered that the current design issues require better integration of voucher, top up, and password-free payments into payment.
Beyond direct user research, insights were gathered from multiple stakeholder channels to triangulate findings and align on design priorities.
Feedback from app store reviews, local operations teams, and regional PMs often pointed to the same core usability pain points — validating the research findings.
Stakeholder input was used to prioritize which market-specific adaptations were essential vs. optional, helping define the flexible-core model for the design system.
In large-scale systems, design decisions are deeply constrained by reality. Instead of designing for the ideal case, we designed for adaptability under constraints
Based on research and constraints, we defined a key principle: Standardize the flow, but allow flexibility in configuration
The back-end system is incompatible
Admin system has insufficient functions.
Compatible with access requirements of different services
Business Priorities
The final design establishes a unified Scan & Pay architecture that supports both scan modes — Customer Scan Merchant and Merchant Scan Customer — across all six markets.
