Helio
As founding product designer, I helped build Helio's initial brand and MVP from the ground up in two months. The work covered checkout flows, merchant dashboard design, payment creation, wallet surfaces, and the early product language for crypto payments.
Initial brand and MVP built from zero in two months.
Helio simplifies crypto payments for merchants and creators by making checkout, payment links, embeds, and wallet flows easier to understand. My work focused on the first product expression: the brand, the MVP experience, and the core merchant surfaces that helped the product move from idea to usable payment platform.
A product language for crypto checkout
The first version needed to explain crypto payments without making the merchant feel like they were configuring infrastructure. I worked on the brand, core interface patterns, payment creation flows, and checkout presentation so the product could be used and understood quickly.
Defined the early visual direction, product tone, and presentation layer.
Designed the first merchant flows from dashboard to checkout creation.
Made crypto payments clearer through familiar commerce patterns.
The first public product surface
The landing page established the early Helio identity and framed the product promise around simple billing, subscriptions, and invoices. It was the first place where the brand, checkout concept, and customer value had to feel coherent.
A merchant dashboard for the MVP
The dashboard had to make payment activity understandable from the first session. Pay Links, Pay Streams, balances, transactions, and address book entries were treated as operational tools rather than separate product experiments.
My design focus was on giving merchants a clear starting point: what has been paid, what is active, what needs attention, and how quickly a new payment can be created.
Sell anything, anywhere
Pay Links made it possible to create shareable checkout links in minutes and receive payments in USDC and other digital currencies. This was one of the clearest MVP surfaces because it translated crypto payments into a familiar merchant action.
From a product design perspective, the goal was to reduce the mental load around networks, tokens, swaps, and pricing while still keeping enough control for advanced sellers.
Commerce integrations without a heavy setup
Helio needed to work where merchants already sold: Shopify, WooCommerce, websites, apps, and community platforms. Plug-ins and embeds extended the checkout beyond the dashboard and made the payment experience portable.
The design work was not only the checkout interface. It also included making technical setup feel legible through structure, labels, states, and developer-facing examples.
Trust, payment context, and asset clarity
Checkout had to work for crypto-native users and for customers coming from traditional payment habits. The design work balanced speed, clarity, and confidence by making payment state, wallet context, fees, timing, and supported assets visible where they mattered.
Pay with card
Traditional payment entry points made the product more approachable for non-crypto native customers. The merchant could still receive crypto while the payer used credit, debit, or bank transfer rails.
Wallet context
The wallet view supported asset understanding, balance visibility, and payment confidence. It gave users a clearer sense of what they owned and how assets moved through checkout.