CureMint Banking & payments
An all-in-one banking and payments platform allowing users to pay their bills from the same place they manage their bills. This product resulted in $300,000 cash deposits within the first three months and monthly transactions of more than $10,000.
UX Designer
Product Owner
QA Manager
My Role:
Designed in Figma
Released in LaunchDarkly
Tools:
1 UX Designer
1 Product Manager
4 Full Stack Engineers
Team:
Curemint needed to expand on its existing product feature that allowed users to capture and store their bills. There was a desire for users to be able to pay those exact bills within the same platform.
Problem:
A user-centric and feature rich financial operation suite was designed and built that included bank integration, banking services, and allowed CureMint’s customers the ability to send and receive payments.
Solution:
Research
I collaborated with the Product Manager to understand the product strategy for these banking features and clarify the desired business outcomes. CureMint was repositioning itself as a cost management solution for the dental industry and banking features were a key part of the new offering. With these new features, customers could automate their entire bill pay process and CureMint could increase revenues through interest and interchange fees.
Product Strategy
Since banking was an entirely new domain for the company, I did extensive research to understand current trends, terminology, and processes in the banking industry. I then collaborated with engineers to strengthen my understanding of the underlying technology that powers the banking system and its constraints. This included reading API documentation for the financial services platform we would be building on top of understanding what information and actions could eventually be integrated into the experience I designed.
Technical Research
Object Mapping
I used an object-oriented approach to gain a holistic understanding of the banking system. Traditionally, systems are divided up by their verbs - what you can DO within the system. Instead, I broke the system up into its component nouns- the objects that the system is built on- and dissected the core content and relationships between those nouns. This approach quickly surfaced hidden complexity and allowed seamless collaboration with engineers who work in the same approach.
Competitive analysis
I led a competitive analysis with an engineer and product manager to identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the product offerings of several competitors. From this, I created a screenflow using screenshots from each product to identify similarities in their user experience. Many of them made use of side panels or drawers that display more detailed information about accounts and transactions as well as a wizard flow pattern for sending payments.
Design Process
Collaborative Wireframing
I began leading daily design sessions during which the entire project team collaborated on crafting our product experience. We used a blend of paper wireframes, screenshots of competitors’ products, and low-fidelity mockups to construct a screenflow of what would eventually become our banking and payment features.
Design Iteration
During our daily collaborative design sessions, we would meet in the morning to review work, discuss, ask questions, challenge assumptions and iterate on the design. In the afternoon, I incorporated the team’s feedback, refined the design, and then present the updated designs at the next day’s design session. This continued for several weeks until we were confident that we had a working solution.
Prototyping & user Testing
I created a clickthrough prototype from our screenflows to share with our customer advisory panel, a group of users who had volunteered to test new features and provide feedback. I created an assumptions matrix to guide me as I wrote testing scenarios so that I could focus the majority of testing on the parts of the design that involved the most ambiguity.
For example, we created a scenario in which we weren’t sure that users would understand what a CureMint bank account was. After additional research, this scenario was correct so I designed an informational modal that would display when the user clicked “create account”. As a result, there was reduced confusion about what a CureMint bank account actually was.
Development and QA
Following testing, I created annotated high-fidelity mockups and reviewed them with engineering so they could begin development. As they were building the feature, they continuously released working code to our staging environment. I acted as QA Manager and tested the feature to ensure that they met acceptance criteria and complied with the designs. Additionally, I led the entire company through a regression test of the entire CureMint product to ensure that the code we were releasing didn’t break other parts of the product.
Release Process
Once the bugs identified during QA were addressed, we proceeded with a dark release. I acted as Product Owner and watched as our Finance team conducted real transactions using the new feature. Their valuable feedback was captured and prioritized, uncovering certain issues that needed further design, development, and testing before progressing with the release. Moving on to the alpha release, I gave select customers access to the feature and gathered additional feedback. At the same time, I collaborated with Product Marketing and Customer Success to familiarize them with the feature for future support.