Enhancing flows for making a payment and managing recipients
2024-2025
3 product managers
3 designers (lead)
1 researcher
10 developers
Experience
user research
product design + implementation
Our team is launching a new bank by JPMorganChase for startups, aimed to scale with our clients as they grow in size. During this time, I worked on boosting our flow for 1) making a payment with competitive research and a review panel, and 2) who our clients choose to pay with adding, editing and viewing recipients.
How we stack next to our competitors
First, I captured the payment initiation flow across our competitors. I then led the initiative to assemble information into a matrix to more easily compare features.
For each row, we pulled key examples to illustrate the through line of how companies understood the user’s needs and preferences.
The most prominent theme that emerged was a deceptively simple payments flow.
They made it easy for anyone to create and complete a payment, understanding not only the questions users asked themselves along the way, but also the order which they may want to answer to fill necessary fields as quickly as possible.
For example, competitors display steps one at a time (left to right is Brex, Mercury, Column).
Building bridges across the product-dev-design triad
The design team organized a two-day workshop at the launch of the project together to align key use cases, user flows, journeys, and ways of working for now and beyond.
One activity I was in charge of was first separating into teams with each triad representted to build their ideal payment flow.
One activity I was in charge of was first separating into teams with each triad represented to build their ideal payment flow.
The activity set the tone for what we all wanted out of the payment experience because many team members came from legacy systems that displayed all field inputs front and center.
This was a great segue to then think about our future value propositions to clients. We also brainstormed on challenges that clients might face, from determining their product’s market fit, to lack of mentorship.
Scaling up for ever-expanding use cases
In our first iteration, we focused on a progressive step display. Next, a big bank, since we always need to consider both big and small corporations' payment requirements, we wanted to design something flexible to an array of challenges.
We used container cards (steps 1-7) as modular blocks with the hope that blocks can be easily added or modified for future accommodations.
There's also a new payment preview that dynamically updates like an online shopping cart.
In our research, we were inspired by e-commerce’s shopping cart interface. Retail companies (e.g., Wayfair, Amazon, Target) have reflect the receipt of purchase prior to confirming.
As payments get more complex, there will be an even greater need to recap payment details.
Here's a close-up of some of the items on the recipients page.
There are four recipient statuses: Available, Declined (e.g., recipient approval declined), Unavailable (e.g., blocked), and Needs approval.
Recipient management modals include: a fraud modal for paying the right recipient; a warning modal for removing an account; a modal to change the recent activity display.
Finally, I designed two drawers for table configurations and one for recipient details.
Outcomes and learnings
Our official launch to friends and family will be for Q2 2026, but we did conduct research interviews with six participants.
The design team stitched together respective flows for dashboard, payment activity, and making payments into a single prototype. With the research team, we conducted 1-hour long unmoderated feedback and usability testing sessions, taking notes as they navigated through.
“This is good. We can have all of our vendors in one place and I can group them together.”
For making payments, 5 of the 6 participant felt that the flow was easy to follow and effective, finding the review card surprising but helpful.
All participants were pleased with recipient management, finding it met or exceeded expectations. They appreciated features like favoriting, and table customization, though some suggested replacing recent recipients with favorites.