Total Merchant Services

Total Merchant Services is an enterprise payments company processing over $1 billion in annual transaction volume. They needed a single designer to own everything: a new point-of-sale product, a dual-facing CMS, 10+ company website redesigns, and mobile UI adaptations across the Groovv product suite.

I joined as the sole UX designer and held full ownership across all of those surfaces simultaneously — from initial strategy and wireframes through final front-end implementation.

Enterprise payment companies are credibility-sensitive. Every product surface — merchant dashboards, administrative tools, marketing sites — signals whether the company can be trusted with $1B+ in annual volume.

• —No prior design system or shared pattern library existed
• —Multiple product lines (POS, CMS, web) needed visual coherence without a dedicated design team
• —One designer covering product strategy, UX, UI, and front-end builds simultaneously
• —Stakeholder reviews spanned product management, engineering, marketing, and executive leadership
• —SEO and organic traffic were measurably lagging — a business problem, not just a design one

The challenge was organizational as much as technical: build the design function while building the products.

As Lead UX Designer, I was the entire design function — no handoff to other designers, no separate team. I owned product UX, visual design, and front-end implementation for every concurrent project.

• —Gathered and prioritized user requirements with product managers and engineering leads
• —Designed the POS system from the ground up: transaction flows, terminal interface, edge-case handling
• —Designed a dual-audience CMS: internal operations team and external merchant portal
• —Redesigned 10+ company websites including the main totalmerchantservices.com property
• —Built and maintained a design system and shared component library
• —Adapted desktop interfaces to Android and iOS across the Groovv product suite
• —Presented concepts to senior leadership and managed feedback across multiple departments

Working as the sole designer in an enterprise environment meant research had to be embedded in the work cycle rather than front-loaded. At the start of each major project, I ran stakeholder interviews to surface requirements and map existing mental models.

For the POS system, I traced transaction flows against merchant operations to locate where friction accumulated. For the website redesigns, I audited each property against competitor benchmarks and SEO criteria before building new information architectures.

Design guidelines, pattern libraries, and reusable components were built as a byproduct of real project decisions — not as a separate initiative that would never ship.

The work produced several distinct products under a single coherent visual and interaction language:

• —POS terminal: a task-focused interface for fast merchant transactions, built for minimal training
• —CMS platform: dual-audience system with role-based navigation and a shared visual language
• —Website suite: 10+ redesigned properties with structured content hierarchies and consistent brand standards
• —Mobile adaptations: Android and iOS variants for the Groovv product family, derived from desktop patterns
• —Pattern library: reusable components and guidelines that reduced design and development overhead across concurrent tracks

• —$1B+ in annual transaction volume processed through systems I designed and specified
• —30%+ increase in organic search traffic within four months of the website redesigns
• —10+ company websites shipped, each replacing legacy builds with maintainable, performant systems
• —POS and CMS products launched on schedule — sole designer, no design bottleneck
• —Design system reduced rework and coordination overhead across multiple concurrent product tracks