REQpay

SaaS platform that helps construction teams quickly create compliant, bank-ready payment applications and draw packages to reduce billing errors and speed up approvals.

Impact

From the field:

I used to spend two hours per submission correcting errors. Now it takes 20 minutes.

Overview & Role

Duration: 6 months
Origin: Israel, USA
Team: 2 designers + lead
Status: MVP completed

My role: I joined at MVP preparation stage as Design Lead, owning end-to-end UX strategy and execution. I led the design team, drove user research, defined core flows, and built a scalable design process aligned with both business goals and engineering constraints.

Problem Statement

Construction payment workflows are multi-party, compliance-driven, and heavily manual. Fragmented documentation and inconsistent processes cause frequent errors, delayed approvals, and cash flow disruptions.

Users lack clear requirements, visibility into status, and timely feedback — leading to repeated corrections. For the business, this creates operational overhead that slows project delivery.

The MVP goal was to turn complex construction billing into a clear, structured, and predictable experience — measured by: guided workflows that reduce submission errors, faster approval cycles, and a UX foundation built to scale.

Discovery & Research

Research Framing

Given the complexity of construction finance, discovery focused on understanding real-world processes before touching UI. The goal was to map systemic breakdowns across roles, handoffs, and compliance requirements — not to optimize isolated interactions.

Methods: Stakeholder interviews across product, finance, and domain expertise; analysis of billing, approval, and lender review workflows; mapping dependencies between subcontractors, GCs, and lenders.

REQ Pre-launch baseline — Pre-launch baseline

REQ Post-launch usability — Post-launch usability

REQ Overall satisfaction — Overall satisfaction

Key Insights

Synthesis of research surfaced several recurring patterns that shaped the product direction:

Incomplete or rejected submissions were rarely caused by user error, but by unclear requirements and late feedback
Review inefficiencies stemmed from inconsistent submission structures rather than volume
Lack of status visibility created unnecessary follow-ups and delayed approvals
Flexibility without guidance increased risk rather than efficiency

Core takeaway: users did not need more options — they needed clarity, guidance, and early validation at every step.

Users & Core Needs

We mapped three primary personas operating within the same workflow but optimizing for different outcomes: subcontractors focused on first-time submission success; finance teams on speed and risk reduction; lenders on compliance and auditability. Despite different motivations, all roles depended on the same shared data quality.

Journey Insights

Journey mapping and job stories revealed that friction consistently occurred at transition points:

Preparation → Submission
Submission → Review
Review → Approval

Most breakdowns were caused by missing information, unclear expectations, or delayed feedback between roles.

REQpay — user journey map — Three roles across the payment application lifecycle

Research Synthesis → Design Direction

Based on these findings, we aligned on a set of experience principles that would guide all MVP decisions:

Clarity over flexibility
Prevention over correction
Consistency over customization
Transparency over assumptions

These principles formed the foundation for subsequent UX and UI design decisions.

UX & UI Design

UX Strategy

Research pointed to one core problem: users weren't making mistakes — the system was failing to guide them. The UX strategy focused on reducing ambiguity before it reached review stages, not after.

Key decisions: step-by-step workflows for high-complexity submissions; explicit constraints surfaced upfront; progressive disclosure to limit cognitive load; inline validation to catch issues before submission.

Design Process

At MVP stage, establishing the process was as important as the designs themselves. I defined collaboration rituals with product and engineering, documentation standards for handoff, and design principles to keep decisions consistent as scope grew.