The Scenario

The friction points in the console were preventing payment success

The AWS payments console had usability issues that were leading to a low payment success rate.

The Problem

Our biggest customers couldn't pay successfully

The usability issues being experienced by users were causing difficulties with the payment processing, resulting in failed transactions and frustration. A majority of those issues being experienced by enterprise customers.

Pathway to the Solution:

Connecting the dots between all the issues & pain points

I collaborated closely with previous designers, product managers, and developers to document where users encountered issues in their payment journeys, identifying common pain points. After reviewing existing research and conducting additional studies, we identified four key usability issues contributing to payment failures.

MVP Solutions

Quick wins with big impact we could implement cheaply and quickly

1) Flexible payment options

Solution 1: Give customers their outstanding balance and an option to pay their balance in full

Technical Constraint: The payments back end system had to tie any payments to specific invoices

MVP Solution: To get around the constraint and tie payments to invoices, we decide to give 3 payment options: customers 3 options when completing payments: ,, invoice-specific or dollar amount

• Pay for all outstanding invoices
  
• Pay for a select amount of outstanding invoices
  
• Pay based on the amount you want - and we'd apply the payment the the most past due balances

1) One source of truth for payment overview

Solution 1: Create a new payment overview page outlining:

• One outstanding balance
  
• A breakdown of all pending payments (including wire and check payments)
  
• A transaction view of all payments made, refunds, invoices due, credits

Constraints: Wire transfers and checks we collected by at team at AWS and were manually used to pay invoices one at a time for the customer. So we internally would have to wait for that team to input the payment which tool a long time

MVP Solution: Update the payment overview page to include:

• Use Machine Learning to predict the amount of pending wire or check payments incoming based on what the customer has done in the past
  

The Impact

We advocated to leadership to prioritize these solutions over temporary fixes, which led to significant improvements. Eventually got the solutions added to the roadmap and implemented.