A mobile-first FinTech prototype letting shift workers access earned wages before payday. Discovery to tested prototype in 5 weeks, validated with 12 participants.
Earned wage access — the ability to draw down wages you've already worked for before your scheduled payday — is a growing sector in FinTech, but most of the existing products have been designed for office workers with fixed salaries and predictable schedules. ShiftPay's founders saw a gap: the people who need early access to earned wages most urgently are shift workers in hospitality, retail, and logistics — workers whose hours are variable, whose paydays are irregular, and whose financial resilience is thin.
They came to us with a working financial model and a product hypothesis, but no design. The brief was to validate that hypothesis with real users, design the product around what we learned, and deliver a prototype that the team could take into investor meetings and early employer partnerships. Five weeks.
We conducted eight in-depth interviews with shift workers across hospitality, retail, and warehouse logistics — recruited specifically to include people who had used payday loans or overdraft facilities in the past year, since those were the ShiftPay use cases we were designing an alternative to. Interviews ran 45 minutes each, mixing structured questions about financial behaviour with more open prompts about how money stress shows up in day-to-day life.
The findings were clear and consistent. Participants didn't think about "earned wages" as a financial concept — they thought about it in terms of specific moments: when rent goes out, when a school trip payment is due, when the car needs fuel to get to the next shift. The product needed to speak to those moments, not to abstract finance.
We also ran a competitive audit of Wagestream, Hastee, and PayActiv — the three main players in the UK market — and mapped where each fell short for variable-hours workers: most calculated available balance based on contracted hours, not actual hours worked. That was the gap ShiftPay was filling, and it needed to be front and centre in the UI.
"I've got money I've already worked for sitting there and I can't get to it until Friday. That's not right, is it?" Research participant, hospitality worker, 27
Before opening Figma, we spent a week on product principles. This step is often skipped in fast-moving startup projects — and it's almost always a mistake. For ShiftPay, we needed to answer questions that would determine the design: What is the main action? (Access money now, or check what's available?) How do we handle the fee model without it feeling predatory? What's the employer's role in the app, and does the worker ever see it?
We landed on three product principles. First: earned balance first, everything else second. The home screen should open on a clear, real-time view of how much you've earned so far this period — no friction, no intermediary step. Second: fees that feel fair. Rather than hiding the fee until the final confirmation screen (the pattern most competitors use), we built the cost into the "available to withdraw" calculation from the start. Third: no employer branding in the worker experience. The app is yours; the employer relationship happens in the background.
These principles weren't design opinions — they came directly from what participants told us in research. Making them explicit before design started meant that every subsequent decision had a foundation to test against.
The 52-screen prototype was built around three primary user flows, each designed to be completable in under 60 seconds.
Flow 1: Check and withdraw. Home screen shows current earned balance, calculated from actual shifts worked. Tap to see breakdown by shift. One tap to withdraw, amount picker, review with fee shown, confirm. Money in account within 60 seconds. This was the core loop — it needed to feel effortless, and it needed to feel like a bank app, not a loan app.
Flow 2: Upcoming shifts. A lightweight shift-log view showing hours worked this period and confirmed upcoming shifts, with a projected balance indicator. Workers could see what they'd have available by the end of the week without doing mental arithmetic. This was directly requested in research — multiple participants described sitting with a calculator working out their expected earnings.
Flow 3: History and limits. A transaction view and a transparent limit management screen. ShiftPay uses a rolling access limit to prevent workers from drawing down 100% of earned wages every day — building in a small buffer to make sure tax and employer contributions are covered. This needed careful UX: the limit had to feel like a feature, not a restriction. We wrote it as "your protected balance" — the portion ShiftPay holds to make sure the end-of-month transfer goes smoothly.
We ran two rounds of moderated usability testing — seven participants in round one, five in round two. Participants were given three tasks: find out how much you have available right now; withdraw £80; and find out what you'll earn by end of this week. Sessions were recorded and coded for hesitation, error, and confidence.
Round one flagged two significant issues. The earned balance calculation wasn't immediately readable on the home screen — participants had to squint at a small number that got lost in the surrounding UI. And the fee, even though it was shown upfront, was being misread as a percentage of total earnings rather than a flat transaction fee. Both were design failures we could fix.
For round two, we enlarged the balance to a dominant typographic element on the home screen — the biggest number on the page, given visual weight that matched its importance — and rewrote the fee display as a flat pound amount (£1.49 to access these funds) rather than the original percentage breakdown. Round two participants moved through all three tasks without significant hesitation. Average task completion time dropped from 94 seconds to 41 seconds.
ShiftPay completed the project with a 52-screen Figma prototype, a design system and component library, a strategy document covering the three product principles and their research basis, and a testing report. Jamie produced a polished visual deck for investor presentations built from the prototype screens.
The founders used the prototype to secure two employer partnership conversations and an introduction to a seed investor — all within three weeks of prototype delivery. The core insight from the research — that shift workers think about money in terms of specific life moments, not financial abstractions — became the foundation of their investor pitch narrative.
"We came in with a spreadsheet and a hypothesis. We left with something we could actually show people — and the research to back up every decision in it. Whitecliff understood the problem better than we did after two weeks." Co-founder, ShiftPay
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