Maria Borodina

I find wherepeople give up.Then I redesignthat part.

Maria Borodina in a tailored coat and trousers, seated on a curved chrome chair, in black and white

I’m Maria, a product designer in Tallinn. I work on growth and core product for fintech, SaaS and web teams across Europe and the US, and I like a funnel with fewer holes.

After the work at Gcore, 27 of every 100 people dropped off, down from 45.

Things I made, and what they moved

Showing 5 of 5 projects

Wallester, 2024 to 2025. Website and design system

A card company website for two very different buyers

30%higher retention and task completion after I redesigned onboarding and payments

Wallester home page with two paths, Business Expense Cards on black and White-Label Card Issuing on white Wallester Expense Business Cards page on black, with tiles for corporate cards, e-wallets, a customer review, the dashboard, payroll payments and multi-currency support

Wallester provides card issuing and embedded finance. I started with research on the target audience, then redesigned the website with a mobile-first approach, optimized its user flows and conversion points, and built the design system behind it.

That covered the main page and product pages for business, virtual and prepaid cards. Product, engineering, marketing and compliance all had a say, 15 stakeholders in total, because a fintech site has to convert and stay regulation-aligned.

  • NextEnglish
  • TālākLatvian
  • ДалееRussian
  • EdasiEstonian
  • SuivantFrench

one button, five widths. localized UX in six months.

Wallester mobile website on nine phones laid out on a green background, covering card offers, company numbers, FAQs and news

the parts behind the pages

Wallester design system components including accordions, language dropdowns, toggles, checkboxes and buttons in three colours

See the Wallester case study in Figma

Gcore, 2022 to 2024. Website and design system

Making edge infrastructure look simple

Gcore runs cloud and edge services with 210+ points of presence. I redesigned its website and built a design system to match, then used both across product pages for CDN, DDoS protection, containers and AI inference. I also developed a unified design system for emails.

Analytics-driven iterations and A/B and multivariate tests decided what stayed, and drop-offs fell from 45% to 27%. Those are the sticks at the top of this page. I started there as a junior designer, helping to create 95 web and marketing assets with 5 senior designers and 6 developers.

See the Gcore case study in Figma

35%more leads and conversions from the landing pages
Gcore Inference at the Edge page with an AI chip hero, a statement about edge inference and cards for performance, scale and cost Gcore Global DDoS protection service page with an orange isometric illustration of servers and a figure guarding a data flow Gcore Container as a Service page with diagrams for AI inference at the edge, streamlined microservices and third-party integrations
Wallester Client Portal on phones, showing card lists, card details and a receipt reminders dialog

Wallester, 2024 to 2025. Product design

Card admin for people with real work to do

The Client Portal lets businesses manage their finances, so I designed it around the jobs they repeat: freezing cards in bulk, setting limits, checking details and enabling receipt reminders, on desktop and mobile.

Users reported a 30% reduction in task completion time for key financial processes.

See the portal case study in Figma

Wallester Client Portal on desktop, showing a Facebook ads card with its details, spending limits and receipt reminders Maria's Figma working file with step-by-step screens for physical card replacement, virtual card replacement and receipt reminders

from my working file: card replacement and receipt reminder flows

Wallester, 2024 to 2025. Email design system

One system for every email

Promo, product and system emails all do different jobs. I built reusable templates and components that keep them consistent and put mobile first, from the “300 free virtual cards” offer to app updates and localized campaigns.

promo, product, system: same bones.

See the email case study in Figma

A collage of Wallester emails covering product updates, card offers, top-ups and exclusive benefits

UX research and library

The homework behind the screens

My research library collects the methods I use and the rules I design by: click testing, usability testing, card sorting and tree testing, alongside design tokens, information architecture, navigation, grids, mobile menus and breakpoints.

See the research library in Figma

UX library cover titled Research Methods, with tilted cards for design tokens, testing methods and content principles

Freelance, 2025 to now

Lately, I help early-stage startups ship

I take digital products from UX research through wireframes and interactive prototypes to production-ready UI. I work closely with engineers, which reduces rework and helps teams deliver sooner.

How I work

Structured workflows and better handoffs cut delivery time by 35% across product and growth work. I also use AI-assisted workflows to prototype faster and collaborate more closely with engineers during releases.

I’m studying marketing psychology alongside my design work, because most drop-offs start as a human decision.

Research, usability testing, A/B testing, user flows, service design, design systems, multi-language UX and prototyping, in Figma, Framer, Adobe Creative Suite, Zeplin, Midjourney and Claude. Teams usually find me in Jira, ClickUp, Notion and Slack.

Path

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  1. Feb 2025 to now

    End-to-end design for early-stage startups. Marketing sites and product interfaces that contributed to about 50% business growth.

  2. Feb 2024 to Feb 2025

    Redesigned onboarding and payments, raising retention and task completion by 30%. Delivered localized UX across 5 languages.

  3. Nov 2023 to Jun 2024

    Landing pages with 35% more leads and conversions. Drop-offs down from 45% to 27%.

  4. Dec 2022 to Oct 2023

    Helped create 95 web and marketing assets with 5 senior designers and 6 developers.

  5. Apr 2022 to Sep 2022

    Technical support for hardware, software and networks, plus deployments and documentation.

  6. 2025 to now

    Studying alongside my design work.

  7. 2020 to 2023

    Bachelor of Science, studied alongside my internship and first design role.

  8. 2015 to 2018, not completed

    Three years of study, not completed.