03
Context
GlossGenius
Instant Payouts
Salon owners faced mounting stress from weekend payout delays, often waiting days to access their hard-earned money. With competitors offering faster solutions, GlossGenius needed a way to relieve cash flow pressure and give users real financial empowerment.
How might we design a payout experience that delivers speed, reliability, and peace of mind?
Role
Senior Product Designer
Timeline
Feb 2023 – June 2023
Skills
UX Research · UX/UI Design · Prototyping · Testing · Project Management
Overview
A platform built for creators, not admins.
GlossGenius is a vertical SaaS platform for small business owners across the salon and studio space. The app gives users a complete set of automated appointment scheduling, payment processing, same-business-day transfers, client management, and built-in marketing — designed to let professionals focus on being creators, not admins.
User goals
Get paid faster, without extra hassle
Ease the stress of waiting days for deposits
Reliable access to funds when it’s needed
Business goals
Stay competitive with other payment solutions
Increase transaction volume
Strengthen retention with instant access to funds
Key challenges
How might we eliminate payout delays so salon owners can access earnings on weekends and holidays?
How might we reduce the cash flow stress of waiting days for a deposit?
How might we keep GlossGenius competitive with the speed rival platforms already offer?
Constraints
What we had to design around.
We’d studied how other instant-payout features worked, but two constraints shaped how we could build ours: Stripe’s still-new API, limited customer-support bandwidth, eligible vs. non-eligible users, and fraud prevention.
Stripe API
We process payments through Stripe, and its instant-payouts API was still new. We had to learn exactly what it required to work with our existing payout structure.
Fraud
Moving money fast invites abuse, so controls and safeguards had to be in place to prevent misuse and protect users from bad actors.
The Beta
Iterating in a private beta.
01
Initial exploration
I added a Payout Now CTA and debit-card support to the existing Payouts screen, plus a Payout button in the menu for better discoverability.
02
Second iteration
We cut debit-card support for the MVP and took a calculated risk on Stripe’s new instant bank transfers, since our payouts already required linked bank accounts. I also fleshed out the error states a user might hit and how to help them recover.
03
Final iteration
Asked to cut scope and launch the MVP sooner, we split Payout Now into its own screen and renamed the existing Payouts screen to Bank Details for a clearer distinction.
Public Launch
What the beta taught, shipped.
Payout flow
The primary journey: request an instant payout in a few taps, with the fee and the final amount made clear up front.
→
Request an instant payout in a few taps
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A clear fee breakdown — what you get vs. what’s taken
→
Helpful error states when something needs fixing
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Transparent Instant vs. Standard payout detail
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A view so non-eligible users still see their earnings
Link debit card flow
A secondary flow to add a debit card — covering the roughly 44% of testers whose banks weren’t supported for instant transfers.
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Add a debit card as a payout method
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Guided, self-serve setup to head off support tickets
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Covers institutions that bank transfers couldn’t
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Renamed Payouts to Bank Details for a clearer split
The Impact
A fast, clear signal.
$322K
in GPV requested in the first three days, at a 1.8% fee to the business per transaction.
New users
converted from rival platforms looking for an all-in-one payments solution.
More volume
from existing users who chose GlossGenius to get paid, not just to book.
Key Takeaways
What I’d carry forward.
01
Instant payouts are more than a nice-to-have — in competitive vertical SaaS, the timing of funds is a real differentiator.
02
Clarity is everything: fees, eligibility, and error states all have to be communicated transparently.
03
Beta testing with eligible, real users is invaluable for surfacing edge cases early.
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Designed with care in San Francisco.