Fuelup
Fueling your car should take one action: fuel, pay, drive off. Instead, most drivers still walk to a counter, wait in line, and pay — even with a payment method already in their pocket. Fuelup was a fintech product, later acquired by Sberbank; the opportunity wasn't adding more features, it was removing enough friction that going to the counter stopped being the easier option.
Key Metric
Time-to-Fuel
The time between opening the app and the pump activating — supported by in-app completion rate, the share of fueling sessions completed entirely in-app (station select → fuel type → payment → pump active) with zero counter visits. That second number is what proves behavior actually changed, not just that the app got faster in a vacuum.
Station selection
Problem
Users shouldn't have to think about which station to trust — a flagged or unavailable station buried in a plain list causes hesitation before the flow even starts.
Solution
Organized stations into a single scannable list with strong visual contrast — not just color, layout weight — separating "ready to fuel" from "issue" at a glance. This removes the "which station do I trust" hesitation before Time-to-Fuel even starts.
Station details — number, fuel type, payment
Problem
This screen carries the most decisions per second of any in the flow — pump number, fuel grade, payment method — making it the highest risk for clutter.
Solution
Reduced to exactly three choices, pre-filled the ones we could infer (last used fuel type, default payment method), and gave the screen one primary action instead of three competing ones. Pre-filling known choices turns a 3-decision screen into a 1-decision screen for returning users.
Active fueling
Problem
Once the pump is active, the user is just waiting — and waiting without feedback feels slow even when it isn't.
Solution
Real-time progress (liters/amount ticking up) so the wait feels accounted for, plus a clear confirmation state at completion. This is where trust is won or lost — if the user isn't confident the payment went through without a human confirming it, they'll go to the counter "just to check," defeating the whole flow.
Edge cases
Handling what couldn't be simplified
Not every case has a clean path — wrong fuel type selected, payment declines, pump malfunctions mid-fill. Each one is handled with a dedicated recovery state rather than trapping the user in a broken flow.