Project Background
The Paymentus system has several automated notification messages that are triggered to send to users to inform them of important account updates and changes. These include payment reminders, account status changes and security alerts.
New billers often sought to edit the contents of those notification messages so that they reflect their brand voice and identity. Previously, account managers would make the requested changes by coordinating with representatives at the company and would notify a development team to make necessary changes in their implementation to apply the changes using information provided to them.
This was an inefficient and costly process, plus, not all billers had a dedicated implementation representative which meant that their process was longer and typically involved reaching out to and describing their needs to a support team who would later communicate them to development teams who would in turn have to prioritize it against other active development efforts.
I led efforts to define and design a self-service tool which would enable them to customize the contents of those messages. Our goal was to improve this process by enabling billers to customize the outgoing notifications messages through self-service.
The following screens (slider) show the initial design when it was implemented without the assistance or involvement of the ux team (my team). I've annotated the usability problems I solved for:
What I did
While many implementation-specific decisions were already made before proper definition, I worked collaboratively with the product manager and developers, to identify and solve usability issues discovered retroactively while redefining requirements based on findings from interviews, user testing and feedback from billers. The following are key decision decisions I made to elicit a positive user experience:
- Undo unwanted changes made either by you or other users with version history.
- Contextually edit email subject lines so that they can reference the contents of the notification message while writing them.
- Providing timely feedback on indeterminate operations (Saving, publishing) to indicate if and when actions were performed successfully.
- Preventing data loss: if unsaved changes are detected, ensuring users have an opportunity to save their changes before leaving the editor.
How I did it
A heuristic review, supplemented by feedback from billers surfaced obvious usability issues which made using the tool challenging and difficult to use; (Lack of error prevention, lack of feedback, improper layout, lack of information hierarchy etc…)
I worked with the product manager and developers to identify and prioritize those issues, while implementing new features; One of the most helpful changes we made was in providing appropriate timely feedback.
Key Features
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- Preview message content and state while in version history.
- Edit email subject lines in full context.
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Contextually preview messages by sending a test SMS or Email.
Challenges
Due to time constraints, (which prevented me from conducting in-depth research to determine the feature’s optimal placement in provisioning system’s structure IA) I had to quickly decide where the notification messages would be found, how they’d be presented, and how users would navigate to them. I ended up surfacing them as a subpage titled “Notifications” under “Campaign Management” due to their close conceptual associations.
Aside from maintaining consistency and design standards, the biggest challenge in this project was balancing multiple conflicting business requirements, rules, and navigating a rigid system architecture with unconventional interaction patterns; for example:
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- I had to prevent users from saving or publishing their notification message unless mandatory variables were included in their content for compliance reasons. (Which violates heuristics for control and freedom)
