Ualá

When a brand goes through its first years in the market and establishes itself as a trusted option for users, a new need emerges: showing that maturity outward.

Ualá came to Paisanos at that exact moment, carrying both this new stage and a structural problem. Its website was no longer able to properly communicate what the brand had become across the three countries where it operated.

The initial request was to redesign the website for Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia, making sure the quality of the product was reflected from the very first interaction, even before using it.

The product had evolved. Investments, merchant solutions, physical devices. Ualá was no longer just an app for young adults trying to make the most of their money. It had become something broader, more robust, more mature. That’s where we started.

Three countries, one system

‍When we reviewed the three sites, what we found wasn’t a brand inconsistency, but the absence of a system. Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia were operating like isolated islands, each with its own visual decisions, navigation logic, and way of organizing information.

That’s when the challenge shifted. It was no longer about redesigning pages, but about building something that could live across all three markets at once, something that could feel local without losing coherence, and that Ualá’s team could sustain on their own after we stepped away. The project moved from creating pages to building a shared language for the brand.

When sites grow without structure, with different systems and uneven ways of presenting products, friction appears. And friction creates noise. That noise doesn’t just affect the brand, it affects how the product itself is perceived.

Architecture before aesthetics

‍The first step was understanding how the business was structured and how that translated (or didn’t) into the site.

Ualá operates across two very different worlds: Ualá for individuals and Ualá Bis for merchants. Each speaks to a different audience, with different needs and expectations. Before touching color, typography, or messaging, we needed to understand how those two worlds relate, where they intersect, and where they should remain separate.

Once that was clear, we reorganized everything.

We approached the architecture like redesigning a city so it stops behaving like disconnected islands. We defined what belongs where, how users move from one place to another, what deserves to be front and center, and what can stay in the background. Products, features, legal, help, promotions, merchant solutions, each with a clear role in a more legible map.

Navigation was rethought not just as a menu, but as a surface for communication. We introduced a dynamic layer within navigation that allows Ualá to highlight new products, partnerships, or features directly within the browsing experience.

Navigation stopped being just an index and became part of the conversation.

The system behind it

‍The final delivery included 102 pages, but more importantly, a structure that allows the team to keep building without breaking what’s already there.

We designed a modular system with over 40 section types, enabling new pages to be created without starting from scratch, while maintaining consistency. The goal wasn’t to hand over a rigid template, but a flexible foundation that any team could use.

In parallel, we worked on something less visible but equally important: the visual language. Ualá didn’t need to reinvent its identity, it needed to expand it.

We built on top of their existing design system, pushing the visual universe into territories the website hadn’t explored yet.

One of the first moves was typography. We shifted from a small, functional reading style (closer to product interfaces) to a display approach that takes advantage of web scale and creates stronger impact.

Beyond colors and type, the work focused on defining how Ualá shows up: what kind of imagery it uses, how it positions itself in relation to people, and how literal or interpretative it should be when presenting its product.

For imagery, we developed a system based on AI-generated photography with a very specific aesthetic direction: low-angle shots, wide lenses, urban environments, and people in the foreground. A consistent approach across all countries, adapted to each local context to maintain authenticity.

3D as a signal of progress

‍Ualá didn’t previously use 3D renders, so we introduced them as part of the system.

Animations, microinteractions, and 3D representations of physical products like the PostMini, card readers, and debit/credit cards added a new layer of materiality that elevated the overall perception.

We delivered these assets in video and Lottie formats so Ualá’s team could use and adapt them independently, reinforcing clarity and quality across different touchpoints.

We also developed a second 3D layer (more abstract and brand-driven) focused on expanding the visual atmosphere rather than representing physical products.

None of this was explicitly defined at the beginning. It emerged as we better understood the problem, and the project naturally expanded with it.

What started as a redesign became a complete reconstruction of the site.

The result

‍The website can now support what Ualá is today, and what it’s becoming.

It offers a clearer navigation, a stronger distinction between individuals and merchants, and a system that allows new features to be integrated without rethinking everything from scratch. It also brings a level of consistency across countries that didn’t exist before.

But more importantly, the system started to live beyond the website, appearing in campaigns, marketing materials, and even out-of-home placements.

That’s when it stops being just a website, and becomes a way of building and communicating the brand over time.

Behind the entire gamified experience, we left a subtle nod to the brand’s history.

The visual assets were inspired by Mostaza’s burger boxes. We brought the packaging into Adobe Illustrator and extracted the texture that now lives across the banners and throughout the hub. We understood that the brand’s identity also needed to be present in the fan’s most passionate moments, and that our job was to activate it, not replace it.

By incorporating each national team’s colors and creating a distinctive design for every market, we also made the experience feel locally relevant. Argentina and Uruguay are represented in blue, while Paraguay keeps Mostaza’s signature red.

Eight weeks of work later, the numbers began to tell a story of their own.

Since launch, more than 50% of users who entered the hub have completed at least one experience from start to finish. To put that into perspective, most digital experiences of this kind celebrate conversion rates between 20% and 30%.

The momentum was clear from the start: active users grew by 184% from the first week to the second, laying the foundation for everything that followed.