Amount's next generation of point-of-sale solutions

YOUR FORBES

In response to the ever-evolving digital landscape that exists nowadays, Forbes tasked us to design the future of their online experience with the goal of bringing new users to the site, as well as increasing retention of existing users.

PURPOSE   |

In the digital age we live in, customers are used to having relevant news at their fingertips.

FEATURES   |

Surveying to explore how users are currently consuming their news.

BACKGROUND / OPPORTUNITIES   |

Surveying to explore how users are currently consuming their news.

Recognizing that communication channels between design and product could be strengthened, I approached this work by utilizing the active integration of design thinking and principles into our processes.

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

DESIGN PILLARS

TIER ONE - PERSONALIZATION EFFORTS

To start our design process, and to assist in guiding our decision-making and solution, I reviewed existing BNPL solutions that existed within the booming environment. As our solution would ultimately be going up against these competitors, it was critical that design pushed for the most up-to-date features and experience as possible. In reviewing existing solutions, I was able to point to specific opportunities to pull into our flow, as well as critical points where our experience could falter if not handled correctly.

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

To generate tangible documentation as well as improve our processes for future design endeavors, I collapsed these findings into a componentized competitive analysis template and shared it with designers and non-designers alike, allowing for a critical piece of the design process to be easily incorporated into the shaping segments of our cycles.

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

VERIFICATIONS   |

Surveying to explore how users are currently consuming their news.

Initially, Amount had aimed to utilize a previous verifications flow from years prior, which would require a large bulk of customer information to be provided upfront. However, after mapping out our initial user flow I quickly recognized a potential pain-point for our users.

From an experience standpoint, forcing our users through an extensive verifications process ran the risk of increasing the likelihood of drop off and reducing retention rate, leading to a harder sell to our financial partners on integrating this software.

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

I lead working sessions to draft up our unmoderated testing plan within Google Docs, allowing for easy transparency and discussion as to each group’s needs. I then translated our testing definition sheet into two separate unmoderated testing sessions, allowing for rapid results to be collected for analysis.

We asked probing questions on how users felt about our current flow (using our original user flow), if they felt comfortable using it, and if it felt trustworthy enough to enter sensitive information into.

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

Test Overview

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

•  10 participants                    •  Unmoderated sessions                    •  Mobile device

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

Overall, the flow did not test very well. Users voiced concerns about the process asking for too much of their information and, in general, felt far too long compared to competitor solutions that they had used before.

I synthesized these results and presented them to stakeholders, utilizing the concrete data to emphasize the need for a slight pivot in our approach. With the backing of our team, we shifted our initial flow and utilized two distinct opportunities as solutions:

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

OFFER SELECTION   |

Surveying to explore how users are currently consuming their news.

Unlike many of the competitive BNPL offerings in the market today, Amount’s PoS solution prioritized the opportunity to allow our partners to offer users a batch variety of standard or promotional offers.

With a myriad of potential approved loan offers for a single user, we needed to figure out a solution that was both comprehensive and easily understood. After initial discussions, I recognized that the expectations and interpretation of this problem varied greatly across team members. I approached this challenge with a heavy emphasis on team collaboration, transforming static discussions and processes into interactive ones to allow for an overall improved shaping process.

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

With its real-time interaction and collaboration opportunities, Figjam presented an easy opportunity to facilitate collaboration and streamline communication among team members, ultimately leading to more efficient and effective project outcomes.

Using this, I planned, built and conducted a mixed offers workshop with all relevant stakeholders in our shaping process, focusing on ideating how we each perceived the presentation of multiple offers to our users, allowing us to generate a variety of potential solutions that helped define our final page structure.

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

With our page structure solidified, I utilized other ideas and pieces from our workshop to produce five potential solutions for presenting mixed offers to our users. After reviewing with the design team, we honed in on testing three of these designs with our users to validate which approach was most successful. The other two potential solutions (Static List view and List w/ filters) were put through two rounds of design critique and ultimately scrapped due to lack of value for our user.

Unlike the previous test, I shifted this testing period into moderated testing to allow for more complex feedback regarding which approach our users may like best, allowing the team to better align moving forward.

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

Test Overview

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

•  6 participants                    •  Moderated sessions                    •  Mobile device                    •  Zoom call

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

Overall, users expressed a preference for Option C, as it provided all the necessary helpful information while removing the jumping back and forth between pages from Option B. Additionally, Option C provided scalability while reducing the need for taking up so much vertical space.

Throughout the moderated testing, I also recognized a user need for clear and descriptive solutions to the inherent complexity of loan offerings and other aspects of repayment, such as offering down payments. After recording and sharing this data, my team was open to exploring two distinct solutions to expand user knowledge and comprehension.

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

REPAYMENT + PROCESSING   |

Surveying to explore how users are currently consuming their news.

As the final piece of our flow, it was essential that the repayment section of our product was a transparent and dependable endpoint, enabling users to grasp the entirety of their repayment plan and the exact timing of their charges. Our team shifted its focus into conversations and ideating on how to handle this endpoint and input of payment information.

I again used Figjam to facilitate these discussions, only this time shifting it into a more passive form of collaboration. By turning a standard google document into a consistently active discussion, I helped to generate tangible and documentable action items for the team, streamlining the decision-making process and ensuring accountability and follow-through on all ends.

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

From a design perspective, I recognized the opportunity to focus in on a distinct area of our solution: visual clarity. I wanted to design a tight set of UI components that presented a user's selected plan in an understandable yet compact way, allowing the "finishing point" of our solution to remain clear and descriptive across all selected payment plans.

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

WRAP UP   |

Surveying to explore how users are currently consuming their news.

By shifting Amount's static discussions into active ones, in which every seat at the table had a voice that could be clearly presented and heard, I was able to provide layers of transparency both within our shaping process and moving into our build process. With each stakeholder having a clear acknowledgment of action items and next steps, we were able to maintain a seamless workflow across all departments. In addition, generating componentized, templated documentation such as the competitive analysis artifacts provided the design team a resourceful and easily accessible way to generate tangible documentation for our projects.

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

Amount's approach to shaping started off extremely static, with many wires getting crossed due to a lack of cooperation, discussion, and communication. To resolve this, I heavily prioritized incorporating new technologies such as Figjam into our workflow, infusing collaboration and allowing our processes to evolve from static to heavily interactive experiences. 

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

Though once relying on internal opinions and hypotheses to guide our decision-making and feature production, utilizing my skillset in user testing allowed concrete data directly from potential users to be the pillar for our engagement and discussion, ultimately rewiring the way Amount stakeholders considered and approached product and feature creation. 

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.

By incorporating a design-forward approach into the Amount shaping process, we were able to gain a deep understanding of the challenges and pain points faced by users, which helped to identify key areas for improvement. This allowed the team to focus on creating solutions that would best meet the needs of our users, rather than simply pushing for what was easiest or most convenient.

As a result, we were able to develop a highly effective process for shaping Amount that greatly improved the user experience. Additionally, the success with this approach allowed me to join Amount's Software Development Life-Cycle Committee as the advocate for design, making sure that the company's upcoming reorg accurately accounts for design and its benefits within the processes.

After conducting research about my audience and their experiences with task management, I created three distinct user stories that best encompassed the struggles my users will face.