Designing merchant experience for Contactless Payment

Designing the complete UX/UI of merchant App for contactless payment feature to cater to the post-COVID touch-less economy needs.

Reimagine Pinelab's ePOS NFC and pay by link offerings to suit the changing needs of the touch-less economy.

The problem

COVID pandemic has effected each and every business - big or small. Its effects are also felt by the payment gateway giant of India - Pinelabs.

Pinelabs offer Plutus (POS - physical device based) and ePOS (mobile app based) as their primary offerings to the merchants for receiving payments. Pinelab saw a huge drop in number of transaction on their Plutus (POS). It goes without saying that users are now more concerned about the ‘touch’ involved in the exchange of card and POS machine. For Pine labs it meant realigning forces and energies on their ‘touchless’ transaction ecosystem i.e. pay by link and NFC. With these thoughts, pine labs reached out to crossed design. Apart from this they were also keen to understand or identify new emerging markets and/or use cases for the ePOS.

Brief to Crossed Design

Reimagine ePOS NFC and pay by link offerings to suit the changing needs of the touch-less economy. And hence to redesign the complete UX/UI for the product.

The process

Like all our projects, this project also started by understanding the business and user requirements. For this we divided the complete project in 4 phases : Download, Discovery, UX design and UI design.

Download - business understanding:

This phase is usually designed for the effective KT from the Product owners and business learnings from the client team to the Crossed Design team. This helps us in understanding and setting clear expectations within the organisation and assists in smooth flow of the project. During this phase we aligned our teams, created timelines in sync with the client’s development, business and marketing teams.

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Discovery - user research:

Discovery starts with secondary research, bench marking various products offering parallel/similar services. This is followed by an extensive user experience research. We designed various tools and techniques to uncovering deeper insights and empathy. Due to covid complete research was conducted remotely across India. For this we defined parameters to identify users, build stakeholders maps, interview guidelines etc. Data collected was then further synthesised to uncover the hidden triggers, hooks, motivations and fears of the users while using the product. Apart from that we were also able to identify few new emerging use cases which were completely missing from the ecosystem before COVID. This helps us in converting the problems into opportunities for design and development of new features which our user would love.

Primary insights

Reduce transaction time.
Remote payment methods
Emphasis on touchless payment feature (NFC/pay by link)

User Experience Design:

Using the insights uncovered in the Discovery phase as the premise for ideation, we designed new features and user flows for the product. Keeping user behaviour at the centre we optimised and prioritised various features which needed to be build. During this phase we also made sure that the product should work under 99% use cases with minimum to no effort at the user’s end.

UI Design:

Pine labs is an established company with strong brand language and identity in print and web. We needed a digital design language which looks new and refreshing yet echos same brand ethos and values. For this our designers ideated and conceptualised various visual styles for the app layout, illustrations and interactions. After few rounds of discussions with the client team, we finalised one visual style and complete product was created from 0 to 1. Design Guidelines and assists were created ensuring a smooth delivery and handover from design to engineering.

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Working remotely during lockdown

Complete project was executed from idea to final realisation within a record period of 30 days. Due to covid, complete team (both client and CD) worked and collaborated remotely. This also gave us an opportunity to explore such extensive remote collaborations. At Crossed Design, we hope to continue work remotely while offering same (even better) amount of speed and quality for our clients.

Outcome:

Reduced transaction time by 200%
Smart payment flow
Clear transaction details and history organisation for the merchants
Rise in number of transactions on EPOS by 78% (NFC and link payment) despite falling global economy.
Optimised product for emerging remote payment and delivery scenarios due to COIVD pandemic.
Reduced transaction and maintenance costs for merchants by 50-200%