Bill Pay Portal
About the project and my role
Have you ever paid a tax bill, water bill, or parking ticket online? If no, usually these bill payment portals let you schedule a one-time payment or create a user profile to manage and auto-pay your bills. These are some of the main features of this application.
I worked on designing the checkout and registration part of the application. The goal was to come up with a design that can be customized as per our customers' needs. Here customers are referred to merchants (tax, utility, etc), who provide this bill payment service to their customers who are the end-users of this application.
Discovery
We started learning and exploring the legacy application and customers’ needs with the expertise of an internal panel of customer representatives and sales managers. They work closely with customers and have a thorough understanding of their needs and pain points.
We also researched who our competitors are and what they offer. All these insights gave us a head start to move forward with exploring and sketching out ideas to communicate with customers and stakeholders.
We analyzed the information we had and decided on the goals, scope, and limitations of the project. Next, we identified who is going to use the site, their motivations, and all possible use cases.
Four key insights drove our project -
User can receive a paper bill that includes a link to make payments online.
User can receive a message or an email that contains an invoice or a link to make payments.
User can opt to make one-time payments and not register. Eg: paying parking tickets once in a blue moon.
User can opt to create a profile to manage or auto-pay bills. Eg: water, tax etc.
Design
I was in charge of coming up with the ideas, work flows and high fidelity screens. The design aimed to reduce the cognitive load by presenting the information into smaller segments so users can see and process with their own pace. For each step, we brainstorm ideas keeping stakeholders, developers and customers in loop. Here are some of the screens I designed.
Welcome page
The idea was to let merchants customize the information they want to display on the welcome screen for their site visitors. Based on the research, we discovered few helpful items to display will be:
accepted payment methods
service fee
announcements
option to choose between ‘pay now’ and ‘register’.
Search for bill
To initiate a bill payment process, users need to have a unique identifier to find their bills. Usually this could be user’s account number, parcel number, etc. Most common question users ask is ‘Where do I find my account number?”.
To make it easier to locate on paper bill, a sample of the actual bill was displayed highlighting the fields that were asked.
Checkout
We decided to keep bill payment checkout similar to any ecommerce checkout so that it is more relatable to users. Seeing endless walls of information, input fields, and forms on a single page was quite overwhelming for users during checkout. The checkout process slimmed down to just two steps - bill amount and payment.
Creating an account
After several iterations of going through users' feedback, two important observations were made - 1) not everyone is comfortable giving their phone number during the creation of the account. 2) The business wanted to force users to link their accounts first to avoid the creation of any unnecessary and fake online accounts.
Account dashboard
Once the user is successfully registered, they land on a dashboard which summarizes any bills due and their total due amount. The dashboard also displays other important accounts and bill related features in different tabs with the option to pay bills using add to cart checkout feature.
Key learnings
Through this project, I learned the art of receiving feedback. Positive feedback confirms that the problem has been effectively addressed, while negative feedback highlights areas that may still need improvement. The key is to take in the feedback, reflect on it objectively, and determine how it can be used to enhance the solution.