Make A Payment
SUMMARY
This project is apart of a large application portal. It’s a suite of tools that helps the dealer run their business. They can check inventory, business plans, orders etc. My responsibility was to create a few pages in the finance section of the portal.
Project: Make a payment experience
Role: Product Designer
Worked with: PM, PO, 2 dev teams (approx 10)
Tools: Whiteboard, pen and paper, Sketch, Invision and Abstract
PROCESS
Lets talk about the Make A Payment. Before you get your hopes up, guess what? I didnt get to talk any of the users…sigh. So I had to do the next best thing. Talk to my business folks. I wanted to know what the customers are doing now to make payments to the company. I found out that some are doing it the old school way. Snail mail. Others are calling in to do payments over the phone. So this would be a new experience for them.
Would they even like it this new feature? Would they use it? Do they pay their other personal bills through snail mail as well? All these questions and more I asked the business. I got most of my questions answered.
Talking to the business was the closest I was going to get to having “Empathy” for the user.
After getting the info I needed I went to surfing the net. Researched how other companies were doing things. I had several screenshots on my inspiration board to get an idea of how I wanted things to go. I came across banks, fast food and e-commerce sites just to name a few.
VISUAL DESIGN
Next I went to the drawing board. I narrowed them down to a design I thought was good enough based on what I learned from my business partners. I put the ideas I had on paper into Sketch. After mocking it up I added it to Invision to show some interactions on how it would perform.
HAND OFF TO DEV
Once the mockup was complete and approved by business, off to the developers. For a very simple page it took a lot of work on the backend. Having to wait for this department for data and that team for something else. Oh and did I mention the developers didn’t always make the online version look like my design…eek!
But it’s all good. A simple convo …or 2 or 4 or 6 of sitting down with my dev team and showing them were we can make things better was just apart of good old team work.
Unfortunately I didn’t get to test on real users before the product went live but so far the users that have access to the new feature are successfully making payments.
REFLECTION
I learned a lot here. I learned to not get discouraged on trying to solve the problem even though I was not able to talk to the user. Asking the right questions to who you do have access to can still help wonders on a project. I also learned to become a better communicator with developers. In the end we are all trying to reach a goal of putting a great product or feature out there.
