Automatic Payments

Timing

~6 weeks

Personal Contribution

  • Extremely tight timing

  • Meeting deadline for final design file release

Tools

Sketch, Miro, Invision

The Challenge

  • Tight time deadline for release

  • Project lead within my first two weeks at 5/3 before onboarding completed

  • Making least or no functionality change to save dev work and time

Existing Experience

The existing experience already had some issues:

  • No matter which option you choose, all payment options are fixed amounts that can be paid at a selected frequency. For example, If you choose to pay the statement balance monthly, the bank will pay the current month's statement balance every month going forward.

  • Other UI issues include the last option under "Amount" does not have a label for that input field.

  • The "Frequency" option added more to the confusion for making payments.

The Ask

Add the new “Automatic Payments” feature to this existing experience as seen in the image.

 

Competitive Analysis

A quick competitive analysis is an excellent way to check the industry standard for something that has been there for a few years compared to 5/3. Checking the competitive also assures us to keep features similar to what the user is used to instead of creating an entirely new pattern.


iterations

There were a few options where we could launch the automatic payments set up from a one-time payment flow.

One thing to keep in mind during this project was not disturbing the live experience and keeping new dev work at a minimum to save time and effort. This meant being in constant collaboration with the engineering team to check development limitations on any new UI suggested.

Design Pick: Even though we had a few options for adding the new feature, the engineering team had to weigh in on which design would create the least amount of work on their end to meet the release date. The engineers did not want to disrupt the existing infrastructure and voted for the option where the user gets to pick if they're going to make a one-time or automatic payment first.

Old vs New
With minimum dev effort, I was able to add the new automatic payments feature to 5/3 banking experience. A few highlights were:

  1. There is a clear indication of payment type and path before seeing all the amount and date options.

  2. Simplified payment options which will automatically pay the amount accrued. A tooltip was also added to explain what each option would do if selected to educate the user.

  3. Simplified payment date options allowed the user to choose a date.

User Testing (in progress)

Given the tight time frame, we decided to do a usability test for a few items even though the final files were released to the engineering team for development. So I wrote a plan and a brief to test the understanding of Automatic Payments for users and if the launch point for such payments was intuitive for our customers. 

I also planned for a preference test (pending) to check with our users if the word Automatic Payments was more intuitive than recurring payments. We also wanted to test two different launch points for automatic payments to check for a preference. 

User Testing Results

<Results pending>