Klarna
Reimagining how millions of users manage what they owe. With one flexible payment flow, rebuilt for every market and product.
Role
Senior Product Designer
Type
FinTech
Consumer Payments
Timeline
10 Months (2024)
The Problem
Payment management had fragmented across markets and products. Users couldn't tell if they'd paid, find their bank details, or do simple things like pay for a single order.
What I Did
I did: Designed a single, flexible payment flow that adapts to any user, product, or market, grounded in real usage data and user testing, then pivoted mid-project after a company-wide UI redesign priority landed from leadership.
The Outcome
+10% payment completion, -0.5s per payment, reduced ongoing development effort across markets.
The Problem with Paying
Klarna's payment experience had grown fragmented across markets, different flows for checking what you owed, extending a due date, or paying for a single order, shaped more by history than by what people actually needed. People didn't always know if they'd paid, couldn't find their bank details, couldn't pay for just one thing. I joined to help fix that. Two decisions ended up defining the redesign.
Where it started
Every market had grown its own version of the same flow, patched over time rather than designed once. The old UI worked, technically, but asked people to relearn a slightly different process depending on where they were and what they'd bought.
Data Before Assumptions
Before redesigning anything, I ran user testing, workshops, and technical reviews to pressure-test what was actually broken versus what just felt broken. The data told a clarifying story: over 90% of users have just one to three purchases, and 90% use a single payment method. Most of the old complexity was solving for edge cases almost nobody hit.
One flexible flow
Rather than maintaining separate flows per market or product, I bet on one flow that adapts to any user, product, or market, whether that meant entering a custom amount or paying with a local method like Swish. Testing validated the bet: a 10% lift in payment completion, less development effort. But it cost something too. Simplifying the view lowered upsell engagement, and the added speed created some user confusion.
The pivot: a company-wide UI redesign
Midway through, leadership launched a company-wide priority: redesign the entire app under a new UI style. I pivoted fast, adopting the new framework and bringing back a step I'd cut, directly responding to what testing had just taught me, and shipped under the new timeline without lowering the design-to-development bar.
Where it landed
The redesigned flow shipped with real gains: +10% payment completion, half a second faster per payment, and less ongoing dev effort from consolidating what had been market-specific flows. Post-launch, the signals were mostly green, though flow abandonment and misuse of payment options stayed open questions, still being watched rather than declared solved.