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CASE STUDY

MOBILE E-COMMERCE

CHALLENGE & ROLE

SENIOR PRODUCT DESIGN MANAGER
  • Design manager for North America team. Strategy leader/mentor for global design team.
  • Led product design of world-class mobile point of sales app+site.
  • Boosted onboarding success 10x. Improved sales flow dramatically.
  • For Stockholm-based payments multinational Bambora

ANALYSIS

Analyzed research to identify the key personas & workflows to better solve issues that had stumped Bambora & #1 competitor Square for 2 years.

ACTIONS

Led out of the box problem simplification before designing solutions.
  • Managed & mentored product design
  • eimagined hardware setup to eliminate 35-40 min customer choke point
  • Slashed need for long support calls & onboarding time
  • Streamlined usability to improve customer service & increase sales volume
  • Led rapid design/dev iterations: Clickable prototypes, Style & animation guide, Measured results.

RESULTS & ITERATION

FASTER SETUP & MORE SALES
  • Transformed hardware setup from ~40 mins to 95 seconds
  • Boosted onboarding success rate from 8% to 89%
  • Streamlined orders & payment to be 26% faster
  • Slashed need for costly support calls
Produced significant qualitative & metrics improvements to Customer Acquisition, Onboarding & Sales Flow.

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 Payments

Bill brought excellent product design/UX and fresh ideas to our business. He challenges the status quo and brings great energy to every project he works on. A great asset for any business!

Samantha Forster

Head of Operations, North America, Bambora

Bill is a pleasure to work with. The quality of his leadership in product design and personas for Bambora is top notch. Bill is very quick to deliver meaningful value to projects, and does not shy away from challenging convention in order to create experiences that delight users.

Grant Storry

Director of Mobile Products, Bambora Payments

Bill's design leadership always produced products that were innovative, amazingly simple and elegant. His experience and ability to dig deep to analyze, identify and give focus on core functionality & process was a major benefit to my team. I very much look forward to working with Bill again in the future and I highly recommend him.

Sven Resch

Software Dev Manager at Bambora

Details? Read the design story

  • mobile app
  • commerce
  • responsive
  • onboarding
  • habit design

THE CHALLENGE
& ROLE

iOS/ANDROID MOBILE PAYMENTS APP

Stockholm-based payments multinational Bambora needed a world class mobile point of sales iOS/Android app. The usability problems that stalled onboarding and usage resisted the best efforts of previous product redesigns from Bambora and #1 competitor Square. It sat at the intersection of B2B & B2C.

SENIOR PRODUCT DESIGN MANAGER

I was responsible for managing all product design in North America, while providing design strategy & mentoring to the global design team to streamline key usability metrics while improving business results.

ANALYSIS

CUSTOMER ACQUISITION & SUPPORT COST

ESTABLISH TEAM PURPOSE: Remove payment friction to let retailers focus on service, not tech

Gap & Value Analysis:
  • Collaborated with stakeholders & product team
  • UX research on problem space: what exists, internal vs competition, usability gap vs Square
  • feature analysis: effort vs value. Do any features detract value?
  • constraints: platforms, languages, time, dev tech stack, dev limitations?
  • iOS & Android phones & tablets, a few pinpad terminals
  • deconstructing big problems into a set of simpler problems
Research: Personas, Context & Tasks
  • research personas, context of use, what makes or breaks this app?
  • owners need to onboard hardware & software, but quick, accurate usability for low-paid servers is the sales choke point
  • minimum wage servers had high pressure, not enough motivation
Pre-mortem & how to measure (what would success & failure look like?)
  • BLOCKERS: hardware onboarding stops users dead & causes huge support costs, software onboarding is also an issue
  • FAILURE POINTS: servers make frequent errors & take too long to get through orders to focus on good service
  • MEASURE: how many users start but bail onboarding, how long does hardware & software onboarding take?
  • MEASURE: time to process avg vs complex orders, time to get new servers proficient

ACTIONS

GUIDED SETUP, FASTER ORDERS

Goals & Flow Design
  • Coordinated teamwork around the key goals: customer onboarding, reducing need for support, more efficient & accurate retail sales flow.
  • Used research to identified the key friction and usability weaknesses that ruined the experience. Targeted competitive weaknesses where we could lead.
  • Radically refactored onboarding blocker problems. Merchants struggled to onboard & setup hardware for EMV cards (chip & pin) & contactless payments.
  • Delegated & led rapid iterations: research, design, dev & testing to improve results.
Behavior Design - Merchant Onboarding
  • Identified business owners as setup users, while business success depended on real time use by minimum wage servers.
  • Designed a startup expert system experience to guide users through efficient setup of their account & hardware.
  • Simplified design to avoid errors & made remaining errors easy for users to understand and fix within flows.

Behavior Design - Retail Servers & Clerks
  • Designed flows & a startup training experience with behavioral cues specifically for servers/clerks: help them handle & process complex orders quickly & correctly in loud, busy, environments.
  • By streamlining order taking & processing, servers/clerks can focus on quality of service, get tips and enjoy doing their job well.
  • Used visual & behavioral cues to help servers be quicker, more accurate, & feel more recognized for their contribution to the success of the business.
  • Streamlined bulletproof flows to quickly handle complex orders, discounts, tips, taxes, gift/loyalty cards, payment methods & split payments.

Validation, UI, Animation
  • Oversaw visual design elements. Established UI style guide for developers, consistent across various iOS/Android phones & tablets.
  • Iteratively tested concepts, wireframes, & interactive prototypes with input from product team, devs & hardware tests.
  • Designed animation effects & a test plan for on-device usability testing.

RESULTS &
ITERATION

WORLD-CLASS MOBILE COMMERCE

My design leadership led to transformative improvements: decisive gains over 3 previous redesigns and the best efforts of #1 competitor, Square.

Decisive improvements for merchants & owners
  • Boosted onboarding success rate from 8% to 89%. Reduced setup time from 40 minutes to 95 seconds, a transformative improvement to customer acquisition.
  • Slashed high support costs. Removed need for 30+ minute support calls from the customers who slogged through the old setup process (while the rest simply abandoned).
  • Increased software/hardware setup success from 12% to 91%.
Faster orders, more sales & a better experience for servers & clerks
  • Automated training helped new hires be quicker and more accurate with less hand-holding.
  • Early tests indicated 26% faster average order-taking.
  • Customer & support staff usability testing guided course corrections pre-release & after release.
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