This is AccuPay, an AccuLynx Mobile Payment application for collecting secure online payments at the job location. The main requirement for the application was the inclusion of ACH and Credit Card processing. These additions needed to worked seamlessly with the desktop application by automatically updating the job information and notifying any required users of the completed transaction.
We Started with Research:
We first developed some questions we needed answers to understand the user's needs for this product feature:
Who will use the AccuPay app? Why? What tasks needed to be completed? What features do the users want?
What did we find out?
It takes too much time to go back and make calls and send reminders to collect payment.
- Doug, the persona
The Persona
Who is Doug Cash?
Doug is a Retail Roofing Business owner who needs a way to collect payment
without waiting for the customer to send a check. The ideal workflow was
collecting payment on completion of the final walk-through at the end of
the project.
Market research came next.
Based on our research, we developed more educated questions to help us further understand the best approach for designing a strong user experience:
What are other applications doing to collect payment promptly? What are some roadblocks? What's working for them? What's not?
A couple of key points we discovered through our research:
And thus, a new user flow was born.
From here, we built wireframes for early prototype testing.
An Interesting note:
After testing the user flow with a few of our AccuLynx customers, we needed to make a few tweaks to allow the user to enter the card details manually. The business initially thought the user would not want to manually enter the ACH payments because of the higher processing fees.
The application needed to allow the user to collect a payment quickly and email a receipt after processing. The application needed to be simple and intuitive for our users.. I looked at other designs for inspiration and sorted out what worked to fit the desired outcome.
The Design.
After a few iterations we came to the completed design below.
What's Next?
The application has been in the wild for a little over a year. We added a nice adoption rate, adding another revenue stream for AccuLynx. Moving forward, we will use our heap reports and customer comments to see if any future user experience updates are needed.