Redesigning payments to increase engagement (2019)
User research
Personas
Scenarios
Wireframing
Site-mapping
Rapid Prototyping
User testing
Mockups
Overview
At a lean startup, bringing home the bacon is not just sales's job, but everyone's. I tackled this project with the aim of both improving our end user's payments workflow and increasing our company's GMV in anticipation of an upcoming round of fundraising.
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When a lawyer reports their earnings on a client referred to them through the platform, they pay the platform a referral fee. I looked at the reporting and payment page for ways to increase the reporting rate, which would in turn increase the company’s GMV.
Problem & Troubleshooting
These reported earnings were a source of income for the bar associations and contributed to our GMV that we used for fundraising. The problem was that for over a year, pretty consistently, earnings went unreported for around 44% of the cases retained through the platform. This was not a negligible percentage, so I was tasked with doing an UX audit to figure out if there were changes we could make from a UX design perspective to decrease this rate.
I spoke to customer service, looked at analytics, and conducted user interviews. Here's what I found:
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Customer service said they didn't really see tickets on users having trouble with our earnings reporting flow.
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From Mixpanel, I saw that lawyers would sign in to our platform to accept referred clients, but after that initial sign in, there was a steep dropoff in number of lawyers who signed back onto the platform to report payments:
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And yet, a heatmap generated from around 2000 user visits did not yield any clues about existing usability issues:
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From 10 user interviews, we learned that for certain areas of law, for example, family law, the area that also happens to generate the most referrals on the platform, cases can last years. When working on such a case, the lawyers are ignoring our monthly email reminders to report earnings because the family law cases are ongoing, and reporting incomplete earnings to bar association referral programs via our platform is against the rule of ethics. Internally, they reported earnings on a quarterly basis. The following is a visual of how our mental model differed from that of our end users:
We had three choices:
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(1) Do nothing: look elsewhere for ways to raise GMV,
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(2) Switch to sending quarterly email reminders: Even though we're probably not going to see earning reports increase on the platform, at least we are annoying our users less, and
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(3) Find a way to capture earnings for ongoing cases: Even if lawyers cannot provide state bar associations with final earnings reports, could we find a way to somehow capture these ongoing earnings on our platform?
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I decided to tackle the last option because it held the most promise for the impact we set out looking for. I started with rapid prototyping of very low fidelity wireframes for a user flow that allowed reporting on incomplete cases.
Iterations
This iteration's toggle allowed reporting on ongoing case.
This iteration also addressed the user pain of having to figure out the relationship between different numbers every time they created a report.
This iteration explored a checkbox option instead of using a toggle, and addressed the user pain of not having contextual information on previous reports for the same ongoing case.
This iteration explored addressing the user pain of not being able to recall why they needed to pay the 15% Bar Association Community Fee
Final Designs
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Simplifying task flow: instead of asking users to click into each case to report on it, list all cases possible to report on in one place
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Decrease cognitive load with respect to numbers on the screen
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Provide user the ability to report on ongoing cases
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Provide history for submitted reports
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Reminds users what the Bar Association Community Fee is
Outcome
Understanding payments needs of ongoing cases and giving our end users's the periodic payments option raised Legal.io’s GMV by 12% in the next 3 months.