CHALLENGE & ROLE
SENIOR PRODUCT DESIGN MANAGER
- Design manager for North American team & strategy leader for global team.
- Design mentor and coach, leading process improvements for agile research, journey mapping, personas, and usability testing.
- Transformed design process for B2B & B2C SaaS sites & mobile apps
- Boosted e-comm onboarding 10x, reduced setup from 40 mins to 95 secs. Slashed shopping cart abandonment by 22% & pay form setup by 73%
- For Bambora, a global payments startup
ANALYSIS
Analyzed research & stakeholder input to identify the key personas & tasks for over a dozen fintech applications.
ACTIONS
- Mentored local & global team members on best product design, research, & analysis methods
- Led design team through full UCD process on many successful projects: research, wireframes, card sorts, UI patterns, design system
RESULTS & ITERATION
- Transformed the product design/dev process with UCD.
- Streamlined global onboarding for 5 countries, simplified steps by 74%
- Boosted mobile e-comm onboarding by 10x. Reduced setup from 40 mins to 95 seconds.
- Slashed shopping cart abandonment by 22% & pay form setup by 73%.
Bill lives up to his reputation. His design leadership had an immediate, dramatic effect on our fintech user experience strategy. He led the charge to deliver a simplified and delightful user experience across 100% of our products and personas. Bill is an ever positive presence, a pleasure to work with, and absolutely delivers on anything he is tasked with.
Ryan Stewart
Head of Product - North America - Bambora PaymentsBill brought excellent product design and fresh ideas to our business. He challenges the status quo and brings a great energy to every project he works on. A great asset for any business!
Samantha Forster
Head of Operations, North America, Bambora
Details? Read the design story
- design manager
- fintech
- responsive web
- mobile
- e-commerce
- ux strategy
- onboarding
THE CHALLENGE
& ROLE
LEAD FINTECH DESIGN TEAMS FOR E-COMMERCE
A newly formed payments conglomerate (Bambora) needed to bring design culture to each global region to improve product quality. My challenge was to create & apply a design culture & standards in North America. This included redesigning e-commerce portals, B2C pay forms & B2B tracking systems.
SENIOR PRODUCT DESIGN MANAGER
I was responsible for managing the North America design team, while being strategy leader & design mentor for the global design team at a global payments startup. I led the redesign of many e-commerce products & made contributions used globally.
ANALYSIS
REDESIGNING FUNCTIONAL SYSTEMS AS DESIGN-FIRST
ESTABLISH TEAM PURPOSE: Empower every company's mission to their customers by streamlining how they get paid.
I started transforming the design culture by collaborating with stakeholders to define the higher purpose of our work. By streamlining merchants around the world to get paid, we were boosting their ability to fullful their mission to their customers.
Gap & Value Analysis:
- Collaborated with product & business leaders to set out short term and long term design goals.
- Refactored the design culture for the North America division, starting with leading the redesign of the merchant portal.
- Identified customer acquisition, retention & payment forms as the key design problems. Compiled competitive analysis of market leaders: Stripe, Square, Braintree & Worldpay.
- Collected research from around the globe to clarify the customer segements and product mix.
Research: Personas, Context & Tasks
- Spearheaded persona analysis. Led the researchers to collect and analyze customer information to produce and stack rank the key personas.
- Managed the production of stack ranked task lists for each persona, as well as feature vs effort analysis.
- Directed card sort analysis to create the information architecture.
- Created widely-used customer strategy plans: client KPIs, personas, research, journeys & competitive analysis.
- FAILURE POINTS: information overload. too many features in portal currently. can we simplify without removing important functionality? can we introduce an improved new design that doesn't slow down long-term entrenched customers?
- SUCCESS POINTS: must determine what is essential/core vs what is important, but less used, vs what we can cut completely. need to focus design effort on high value customer tasks
- MEASURE: which features are used the most/least time to find a feature in interface, time to change a setting, which features affect customer revenue, profit, costs?
- MEASURE: time to process orders, length of average support calls, time required for customers to find solutions themselves in online help provided
ACTIONS
MENTORING & DELEGATING DESIGN / RESEARCH TASKS
- Unified the work of product owners, analysts, devs, visual designers, QA & support as parts of the North American design team.
- Mentored team members on research methods, rapid prototyping & design methodology.
- Led responsive designs on the back office, marketing, help portal & other projects.
- Managed local design standards & style guides. Introduced contextual help as a better way to help customers with the most complex features.
- Designed optimized payment forms. Created simplified workflows for clients & developers to create, rebrand, customize & deploy streamlined payment forms.
Global Contributions
Contributed to evolving global design initiatives while leading the local design team & developing standards.
- Contributed to the design of a new, much simpler global back office for initial rollout in Sweden & eventual rollout in all global regions.
- Led global design team collaboration for Client Onboarding.
- Designed an optimized expert system workflow for Global Onboarding. Customized the workflow for different products, customers & regional limitations.
RESULTS &
ITERATION
HIGHER QUALITY PROCESS YIELDS HIGHER QUALITY PRODUCTS
- Spearheaded the new rapid design iteration approach, which improved the product development process. Ideas were rapidly iterated & validated or abandoned before committing expensive resources.
- Directed rapid design sprints for each project: research, wireframe, prototype, usability testing & ongoinf iterative refinements.
- Slashed shopping cart abandonment by 22%. Streamlined payment form setup by 73%, reducing 11 steps to 4 while eliminating dangerous security holes.
- Launched streamlined global onboarding flows, customized for 5 countries & their local regulations.
- Boosted mobile e-commerce success rate from 8% to 89%. Reduced setup time from 40 mins to 99 seconds.
- The onboarding system was successfully extended from merchants to partners, who could then onboard their own sub-merchants.