How Phenomenon Studio Rebuilt KlickEx — and Why a 35% Conversion Lift Was Just the Beginning

By Valeria Varlamova, Project Manager at Phenomenon Studio March 13, 2026 ~11 min read UX Audit Product Redesign Web Development

Key Takeaways

• KlickEx’s “Add Money” conversion rate rose 35% after the redesign — not from visual polish, but from cutting seven-step flows down to four and fixing confirmation-state design.
• The “Money Transfer” completion rate improved 30%, contributing directly to $1M in additional funding raised within six months of launch.
• The tech stack — Next.js, TypeScript, React Redux — was chosen specifically for low-bandwidth mobile users across the Pacific Islands, not for portfolio reasons.
• The full project ran six months, covering UX audit, product redesign, and web development. Phenomenon Studio worked alongside Nomupay’s internal team throughout.

There’s a question I keep hearing from founders building payment products: “Our interface looks clean — so why are users abandoning mid-flow?” The KlickEx project answers that better than any theory I could write. We partnered with Nomupay, the New Zealand-based company behind KlickEx, to rebuild a cross-border payment platform serving Pacific Island communities — people sending money home to Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and nearby markets where banking infrastructure is thin and every transaction matters.

Working as a custom web development company with experience across fintech and SaaS products, Phenomenon Studio came in not to make the product prettier, but to diagnose the specific experience problems that were killing real transactions at the worst possible moments.

What the initial audit surfaced surprised even our team. Users weren’t abandoning because they distrusted KlickEx. They understood the product. The problem was friction piling up at the exact moments when commitment was required — too many steps before the first value moment, ambiguous confirmation states, and a mobile experience that had not kept pace with how the actual user base was accessing the platform. Most users were on mid-range Android devices with variable 3G connections. The product had been designed for something else entirely.

The Real Cost of Poor UX in a Payments Product

Before we get into what we changed, let me share the benchmark data we built internally from analyzing conversion patterns across fintech redesign projects we’ve led. Numbers like these rarely appear in standard industry reports because agencies don’t typically publish proprietary diagnostics. We do, because transparency is how we earn client trust.

* Industry averages derived from Phenomenon Studio’s internal benchmarking across 14 fintech redesign projects, 2023–2025. KlickEx figures are based on session data reviewed during the UX audit phase.

The fee disclosure row deserves attention. In our analysis, discovering fees late in a transaction flow is one of the two most consistent drivers of fintech abandonment — the other being unclear status after the user submits. KlickEx had both problems. Fixing them wasn’t a design decision; it was a strategic one.

Here’s a rough calculation using real numbers: if 10,000 users attempt to add money per month and the completion rate moves from 42% to 57%, that’s 1,500 additional successful transactions per month from zero additional marketing spend. At an average transfer of $150 with a 1.8% fee, that’s roughly $4,050 in additional monthly revenue per 10,000 active users, scaling linearly. For a platform operating across multiple Pacific Island money corridors with tens of thousands of users, the compounding effect is why investors responded the way they did.

What We Actually Did — Before the First Mockup Existed

I want to be honest about something: the first three weeks of this engagement produced no visual deliverables at all. That was by design.

We ran user interviews with Pacific Island diaspora communities in Auckland and Sydney. We pulled session recordings and heatmap data from the existing platform. We mapped every decision point in the original transfer flow — the full count was 38 individual moments where a user had to make a choice or interpret information before proceeding. Thirty-eight, in a flow most users expected to take under five minutes.

From that research, the redesign strategy came down to three principles we applied across all the UI/UX design and web app design work:

• Cut cognitive load at the moment of financial commitment. When someone is about to send $200 to family in Tonga, every extra field and every piece of ambiguous copy increases anxiety. Anxiety kills conversion.
• Surface trust signals before the user commits. Exchange rates visible before the confirmation step. Fee totals on the same screen as the transfer amount. Not hidden two steps later.
• Design for the device mix that actually exists. Not aspirational flagship phones — mid-range Android devices with variable connectivity, which is what the majority of Pacific Island diaspora users were actually carrying.

https://youtu.be/durzqAOjk-A

Phenomenon Studio product design and web development showreel — showing work across fintech, SaaS, healthcare, and gaming products.

The Technical Choices — and Why They Weren’t Arbitrary

When a web development agency picks a stack for a payments product serving users in bandwidth-constrained environments, the choices have direct UX consequences. We built on Next.js with TypeScript and React Redux. Here’s why each of those decisions mattered for this specific project.

Next.js gave us server-side rendering, which produced a measurable improvement for users on slower mobile connections common across the Pacific Island region. Pages that previously required multiple round-trip client-side data fetches before becoming interactive were now rendering useful content in under 1.5 seconds on simulated 3G in testing. For a transfer flow, that difference between “blank screen” and “I can see my balance” at second two is the difference between a completed transaction and someone putting their phone down.

TypeScript eliminated an entire category of runtime bugs we found in the original codebase. In a payments product, an unexpected null value in a transaction object isn’t a minor annoyance — it’s a trust-destroying experience that can make a user think their money is gone. Strong typing at the development stage means those bugs get caught before they reach production.

React Redux managed the genuinely complex application state that a multi-currency cross-border remittance product requires: mid-flow exchange rate updates (Pacific Island currency pairs move frequently), multi-step form state persistence when connectivity drops, and consistent UI state across a session that might span twenty minutes of intermittent access.

In my experience managing fintech redesigns, the hardest conversation with any client is explaining that the visual design is not the problem — the information architecture is. With KlickEx, we had to help Nomupay’s team see that users weren’t confused by the brand or the color scheme. They were confused by where they were in the process and what would happen after they tapped ‘Continue.’ Once we fixed that — the sequence, the confirmation states, the fee transparency — the conversion gains followed relatively quickly. In my project work, this pattern repeats more than any other finding.

Valeria Varlamova

Project Manager, Phenomenon Studio  ·  March 2026

Why the Client’s Own Quote Matters More Than the Metrics

After the project launched, Izek Lal, Country Manager at Nomupay, noted that the improvement in mobile usability “contributed significantly to the growth of our business.” That kind of quote is easy to skim past, but I want to be specific about what mobile usability improvements actually affect in a remittance product, because it’s three separate business outcomes, not one.

• First-time completion rate: Users who successfully send their first transfer are dramatically more likely to return. In tightly connected Pacific Island communities, that first transaction is also often observed or shared. Getting it right once creates a loyalty pattern.
• Organic referral behavior: In these communities, word-of-mouth travels through family and church networks. A frustrating experience gets shared just as quickly as a smooth one. The product quality directly affects acquisition cost.
• Support volume reduction: We estimated — based on before/after session analysis — that support contact rates dropped approximately 22% in the three months following launch, primarily because confirmation states were now unambiguous. Fewer confused users means lower operational overhead.

KlickEx redesigned by Phenomenon Studio — the new interface for Nomupay’s cross-border payment platform serving Pacific Island communities. © Phenomenon Studio 2024.

Two Questions We Get Asked About This Project

Isn’t a template or lighter UX refresh good enough for a payments product?

No — and KlickEx is exactly why. A payment platform operating across multiple currency corridors, with compliance requirements and a non-standard device/connectivity profile, cannot be built around a generic fintech UI kit. The dashboard UI design has to reflect actual transaction logic. The exchange rate update behavior has to be specified to the millisecond. The confirmation screen copy has to be written with the specific fears of the actual user group in mind. Templates give you a starting point for a landing page. They give you a liability for a financial product.

What made the $1M funding outcome possible so quickly after launch?

The metrics did. When KlickEx went into investor conversations six months post-launch, they had a 35% conversion lift and a 30% improvement in transfer completion on record. Those aren’t soft UX metrics — they translate directly into projected revenue per user and payback period on user acquisition spend. Investors in remittance platforms understand conversion math. The redesign gave Nomupay a datasheet, not just a prettier product.

What This Tells Us About the Current State of Fintech UX

We’ve worked on enough web app development and user experience design services projects in this space to see a clear pattern. Most fintech products under-invest in the post-commitment experience and over-invest in the acquisition surface. The home screen looks great. The “Send Money” button is well-positioned. But the moment the user clicks it, the experience deteriorates — unclear progress indicators, fee reveals at step six of eight, success screens that don’t actually confirm the transfer reference number.

If you’re evaluating custom web development services for a payment or financial product, the most useful question you can ask any studio isn’t “can I see your portfolio?” It’s “walk me through your research process before the first wireframe.” The answer tells you whether you’re buying design or whether you’re buying strategy-backed design. The KlickEx outcome wasn’t luck. It was what happens when you spend three weeks understanding users before spending fifteen weeks building something for them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What services did Phenomenon Studio deliver for KlickEx?

The full scope covered a UX audit, product redesign, and front-end web development using Next.js, TypeScript, and React Redux. The project ran six months and involved close collaboration between Phenomenon Studio’s design and engineering teams and Nomupay’s internal stakeholders.

Does Phenomenon Studio work with healthcare website design and non-fintech industries?

Yes. While this case study focuses on fintech, the studio has delivered healthcare website development, SaaS platforms, mobile app design and development, enterprise web app development services, and MVP builds across more than 15 industries. Healthcare projects have included Neap (mental health app for diabetics), MyWisdom (aging-in-place platform), and Glume (diabetes management app), among others.

What is MVP in software development and does Phenomenon Studio offer minimum viable product development services?

An MVP — minimum viable product — is the smallest version of a product that can be shipped to validate core user behavior and business assumptions without building the full feature set. Phenomenon Studio has built MVPs for companies including MindTales (which secured $750K post-MVP), Keap ($750K raised), and Both Homes, using a structured product discovery phase to scope only what genuinely needs to ship first.

What is the typical cost range for a product redesign combined with web development services?

A standalone UX audit typically runs $5,000–$20,000. A full product redesign with web development services — covering research, design, and front-end build — generally ranges from $30,000 to $150,000+ depending on product complexity, compliance constraints, and timeline. Projects involving custom integrations, multi-currency transaction logic, or dedicated team engagements sit at the higher end of that range.

Can Phenomenon Studio handle both the design and the web development, or only one?

Both. Phenomenon Studio operates as a full-service studio covering branding, UI/UX design, web app design, and web development — including ReactJS, Next.js, TypeScript, and no-code builds via Webflow for marketing sites. Clients can engage for one service or the full scope, depending on where their existing team has gaps.

The Takeaway

The KlickEx project is useful not because the outcome was unusual, but because the path to it was repeatable. Research before wireframes. Architecture before aesthetics. Confirmation-state design treated as seriously as the hero screen. Testing on the device distribution your users actually carry, not the one sitting on your desk.

We are a studio that has run this process in fintech, healthcare, gaming, logistics, education, and SaaS. The specific domain changes the vocabulary and the compliance requirements. The discipline stays the same. And if the product you’re building is supposed to serve real people making real financial decisions under real constraints — not just look impressive in a pitch deck — that discipline is not optional.

Phenomenon Studio is a product design and web development studio with projects across 15+ countries. View the full KlickEx case study and other work at phenomenonstudio.com/projects. Rated on Clutch and active on LinkedIn.