Liquid

I was brought in during a critical early phase to lead UX and UI design for Liquid, a Techstars-backed startup building a platform to help small businesses pay global contractors quickly and compliantly. My role was to help the team define a polished MVP, improve onboarding, and establish a scalable design language — under tight timelines and real investor pressure.

At the time, Liquid had a strong product vision and basic functionality, but the user experience lacked clarity and polish. The onboarding flow was cumbersome, the visual design didn’t reflect the trustworthiness needed for handling payments, and there was no consistent design system in place. With only three months to deliver a working MVP, we needed to move fast — designing for speed, credibility, and ease of use from day one.

UX Strategy

We had 3 months to ship something investors could rally behind and the product needed to earn trust and reduce friction for risk-sensitive users so we focused our approach around the following three pillars:

• Design for Clarity: Reduce onboarding friction and highlight platform benefits
• Design for Trust: Elevate visual polish and brand tone to signal legitimacy
• Design for Speed: Deliver usable, testable prototypes to enable agile dev sprints

Styleguide & Visual System

Before jumping into flows, I established a foundational style guide. Investing in UI design first may sound backwards, but it gave us the structure we needed to move quickly and scale effectively.

Onboarding

I led a UX audit of the existing sign-up and onboarding flow, benchmarking against Stripe Atlas, Deel, and Gusto. Based on user roles and competitor strengths, I redesigned the onboarding with a focus on:

• Role-Based Personalization: Tailored flows for clients, contractors, and vendors
• Reduced Cognitive Load: Minimized required fields and grouped related info
• Guided Tour: Added lightweight walkthroughs to ease new users into the platform’s features

Interactive Prototypes

To keep things moving fast and focused, I built high-fidelity prototypes for core flows like onboarding, payments, and vendor invites. These weren’t just pretty mockups — they were clickable, testable, and helped us catch friction points early. They gave the team a clear target, sped up decision-making, and cut down on dev guesswork.

Outcome and Impact

My work helped the team deliver a polished product at high speed — without compromising UX clarity or credibility.

• Received strong investor support at launch
• Was adopted across 175+ countries (according to the company)
• Set the design foundation for future features and growth