The payments space is constantly evolving, and the user experience must evolve along with it. We needed to bring a key part of the business into compliance, and do it elegantly.
My roles: Content design lead, product design consultant.
The situation
Peer-to-peer payments started with the idea of transferring money easily from one person to another with a minimum of friction. Make it simple, and the public will naturally gravitate to your product—especially those that may have been left out of the existing financial and banking systems. A low bar for entry can open access for many.
The complication
As the product gained wider adoption, regulators took note and began to apply the rules that other banks and financial products follow. The rules include verification of individual and business identities to ensure that everything is safe, secure, and in line with laws and regulations.
Building out a system that works with the existing product, numerous client states, and legal/compliance needs is a massive undertaking. We risk customers leaving if the process seems too complicated, but it needs to be thorough enough to pass the legal litmus test.
The question
How can we meet new regulatory needs and keep as many users as possible?
The answer
By designing a flow that elegantly balances user expectations, regulatory realities, and compliance requirements.
The process
We couldn’t jump in and start designing without understanding some key things:
- What the regulations require, and how they apply to our users
- What can the platform execute
- What help documentation we need to support the change
- How we are positioning these changes
- How users fare in similar flows (behaviors, data, etc.)
This was a project without a clear start date; it was a situation where this type of work had been happening for some time, but now was entering into a more intense, urgent phase ahead of external deadlines.
Sometimes, a project has a tidy kickoff. Other times, players join mid-stream and make sense of things as they do the work. That’s what we did here. New product manager, new product designer, and a new content designer (me!).
The work
Figma was our home. Components made up that home’s furnishings. We lived in it, welcoming guests from across the neighborhood in the form of business partners throughout the company.
Any minor change to wording within the experience could jeopardize the success of an entire product type, so we needed to remain empathetic and vigilant to the company needs as we brought the situation into compliance.
Most of the work happened in partnership with a dedicated product designer. Together, we workshopped the flows screen-by-screen for the three user types and the varying user states.
From there, I took the experience and flows we’d crafted together and focused deeply on the content itself. And it took focus: business logic, engineering capabilities, and legal/compliance constraints, all handled within the tiny confines of the app’s regular screens, dialogue boxes, and push notifications.
Our business requirements shifted a few times while we were working on it, requiring changes in the experience—sometimes just a language tweak, and other times a reimagining of large portions of the flows.
Content design at this level of business complexity is a little like juggling—three balls in the air is workable after some practice. With 39 separate user states with many of which were dependent on one another, we were juggling all of the balls.
The results
When this work made it in front of design reviews and experience reviews, we were applauded for our deft handling and distillation. In the end, I created:
- New screen and component designs
- New user flows and pathways
- All content, including UI copy, push notifications, and emails
- Writing and messaging guidelines
What started as an unfathomably complex series of scenarios ended as a concise experience that met all of the requirements on time. We broke new ground, created new components and writing guidelines, and ushered in a new era for the company.
To get an idea of the scale of the project (and for fun), here’s a zoomed-out view of one of the user types in the Figma file:
It was one for the ages, this project!