I was responsible in this role for the user experience strategy and design. I led the product development process together with the Product Owner and the CEO of the company. From the discovery phase, definition of the problem, solve the problem and delivery. My Main responsability was to improve the experience of the users with the product, providing solutions who met the need of the users and the business requirements. I worked with developers and QA team on an Agile environment, using a Scrum framework. I have been also participating in creation of user stories and acceptance criterias on Jira.
PAY.COM business challenges had these objectives
The product have been launched without any early research to know the users, their needs, the problems they were facing, their context of use, the current solution they were using to solve their problems, all the development of the product have been done with assumptions and perceptions about users. Because the budget of the company didn't allow an extensive research, product team relied on some “quick and dirty” user research and user t esting to define problems, strategy and improve the product. Throughout the design process we checked concepts and solutions against data collected with some Guerrilla user testing we have done, surveys, Google analytics reports and weekly reports received from Customer Service department.
With defined high fidelity mockups created, based on Customer Service feedback reports and general research, clickables prototype were created to further test and gain more accurate feedback direct from users. Since there was no budget for a comprehensive user research, I used to do guerrilla user testing with people who were playing on some gambling places, sometimes in a coffee shop with at least 5 people or using a usability testing tool on his free version like Usability Hub, Optimal Workshop, User Testing. This gave me a quick look of the problems the product were facing with users. This studies helped me identify pain points and come up with actionable ideas. Two challenges we have to solve on the product were the onboarding and the dashboard flow. These two user flow were blocking users to accomplish their basic goals.
Daily standups with Devs, QA and product team. Sprints grooming, planning and retros every two weeks.
To help understand the complex flow of some part of the product I did user flows on Lucid Chart, doing it help me understand how was the current flow of some of the user tasks and think on an way to improve it.
Instead of wireframing I choose to sketch on paper. Doing this I could put the sketches on a wall and discuss it with some members on the team to evaluate the different ideas and explore more if were necessary, was a better way to iterate rapidly. Also doing the interfaces first in this way, allow us to see the overall picture of the user flows.
To create the designs I used Sketch, Bohemian coding tool. I worked closely with front-end developers together with the product owner to communicate requirements face-to-face and discussing constraints and feasibilities of designs.
We were working in an Agile environment and to communicate the requirements to developers on the grooming sessions I created prototypes on Invision to make more clear how was the flow of some journeys to be improved, changed or added. Prototypes also allowed me to make “guerilla usability testing” with users on a coffee shop or using an online tool like Usertesting, Optimalworkshop, Usabilityhub. Get insight from the constant tests and iterate progressively.
Instead of wireframing I choose to sketch on paper. Doing this I could put the sketches on a wall and discuss it with some members on the team to evaluate the different ideas and explore more if were necessary, was a better way to iterate rapidly. Also doing the interfaces first in this way, allow us to see the overall picture of the user flows.
User Interface Guide Line based on some components of Angular Material and new components created for PAY.COM
This experience in security was one of the biggest challenge I had and as a designer I had to be able to prove that the product was secure, make the people feel safe. The product is a new product with no reputation so was important to indicate that we take care of the safety of the people. Visual design has an extreme importance, when it comes to a feeling of safety, so If you look like a fraud site hardly anyone will trust you with their debit/credit card number, so you have to minimize the feeling of risk by avoiding confusion, giving enough information to the users. The findings on the usability testing done, even on the street was also important for the improvement of the product. We had to follow regulations and requirements from the central bank of cyprus. We also had to work very closely with Risk and Compliance department on some of the product decisions. Was challenging trying to empathize with the people and also with the business requirement, risk and compliance and find the balance to solve problems for everyone.
The product had improved and the response from clients has been positive. The customer services requests about some problems the users were having, decreased. The amount of people using the product increased enormously. More than 3k active users per month for an unknown product. New contract signed with merchants willing to invert on PAY.COM and use it as a secure alternative payment methods for clients in their products. A better usability on the onboarding process and the dashboard, a visual content more engaging and a product that has the possibility to become more well known and solve people problems.