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This Case Study will be moved to my new portfolio website in 1 week with an enhanced layout

Leveraging growth through enhancing the payment and checkout experience

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Overview

Company: Digikala Group

User-base: +40 Million

Project type: #B2C #Fintech #PaymentServices

My role: Design Manager

Collaborated with: 3X Designer, Head of Product, Mobile App Lead 

Situation

I had recently joined the team, and I was leading 2 designers contributing to Digikala E-Commerce group's growth mission in its Payment services, DigiPay, to expand the checkout experience on the retail website, in integration with the payment mobile app. The objective was to increase the payment app users by 1,000,000 by promoting the following services:​

  • Cashback to the wallet

  • Installment payments on Digikala marketplace merchandise

  • Managing and paying installments on the DigiPay App

Problem

The company was investing millions of dollars in advertising. The new users were rewarded with cash in their wallets, which they could buy products from the marketplace. The only way to activate it was to sign up on DigiPay's app.

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Users did register and used the credit, but churned and never returned to the app or the marketplace, after 1 month.

Products

The products my team was handling on this project were the following:​

  • DigiPay wallet and its integration with the marketplace. 1 Senior designer was working on this mission

  • Credit, divided into registering for Installment payments on the marketplace, and managing monthly payments on the mobile app. 2 Senior designers were working on this mission.

Leadership Strategy

The 3 projects were interconnected. I needed to make sure the decisions were in alignment so that we avoided inconsistencies. Therefore, I arranged the following catch-ups:

  • Inside the team: to build mutual alignment between the team members through daily, weekly, and monthly calls

  • Within cross-functional squads: to enable diverse involvement and awareness

  • With the leadership: to align tactical approach with company-wide strategy

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Planning

When it came to planning, the dependencies were straightforward. We first needed to do user research, then possible further usability tests to find usability problems, and based on the insights, combined with data, design the possible solution.

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User research

We interviewed with 20 real users. We invited them to the HQ in one of the meeting rooms and recorded the sessions. Back then, there was no AI assistant to help us. Therefore, we needed to listen to each recording multiple times to extract key phrases. Our team collaboration was like this:

  • The design owner, who had conducted the interviews, went through the recordings and extracted Key Phrases

  • Other 2 designers and I joined afterward in creating affinity diagrams to first come up with Codes, then Themes

Overall, there were 228 key phrases. We categorized them into 15 codes, and finally, we extracted 4 themes.

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As illustrated above, the themes were

  1. Usability: the users had to switch between the Digikala and DigiPay app. Therefore, the use of the digital wallet was complicated 

  2. Features: the users could only use their wallet on their Digikala shopping card and couldn't shop directly from merchants in the DigiPay app, so they didn't find enough motivation to use the app

  3. Customer experience: the lack of sufficient guidance for the users when they were encountering problems while using their wallet

  4. Awareness: the majority of the users didn't know that DigiPay is a part of Digikala group

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One key learning for use regarding the Credit product was that the users weren't struggling in managing their monthly payments. This insight also aligned with the user behavior in our analytics tool. 

Usability Tests

The possibility of conducting a usability test in the planning had become a reality since the highest-ranked theme in the user interviews was Usability.

The 3 designers in my team, collaborated and conducted usability tests with 15 real users on the top 3 flows that the users were struggling with the most in the user interviews:

  1. Engagement with the digital wallet in the app itself

  2. Purchase from merchants on Digikala with DigiPay wallet

  3. Creating an installment plan to make purchases in the Marketplace

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As shown in the charts, the combination of low success rate, the number of errors, and low CES indicates the same results that came up in the interview: The usability of the flows wasn't up to the mark.

 

Findings

  • Wallet:

    • Users didn’t know that their registered mobile numbers in Digipay and the marketplace must be the same so that they could use their credit

    • Users expected to have the option to go to the marketplace, directly from the DigiPay app

  • Credit

    • Users spent several minutes filling out credentials forms before evaluating their credit score. In the end, they might not be eligible for the installment offer​

    • Applying for a credit card was only possible through DigiPay app. Therefore, when the users wanted to checkout in the marketplace, they were shown a message that they should install and continue the journey in DigiPay app. This experience brought friction to the process

Challenge: Covid 19

While we were in the middle of the process, unfortunately Covid pandemic started and the offices were shut down. The challenges I was facing as the design manager were:

  • The teams became remote and many didn't have the experience of remote working

  • Many became infected by Covid and couldn't contribute to the plan

  • Burnout due to not having a clear boundary between personal and professional life

  • We were using the Sketch app for designs back then, which was offline and non-collaborative

  • There wasn't an established remote policy in the company. Therefore, cross-functional collaboration became challenging for us

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My approach to improve collaboration

It took almost 2 months for the company to come up with an end-to-end remote working policy. I took the initiative in my team before that, and through mutual alignment with my team:

  • Setting a fixed availability hour for meetings: from 11:00 to 15:00

  • Creating a Whatsapp group for instant messaging

  • High, Medium, and Low labels for the criticality of messages​

  • Using Skype for video calls

  • Turning on webcams on video calls

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This initiative increased the team's productivity by over 40%. I shared the results with the leadership team, and my team's approach was recognized, and all of the 5 behaviors got embedded in the company's remote policy.

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Using InVision's Freehand for remote collaboration

A friend of mine (also a designer) who was working in another company told me that they're using Freehand for sketching ideas and collaboration in designing. After testing the product, I immediately shared the idea with my team and also other design leaders with whom we were collaborating. Everybody liked the tool very much and we purchased the team plan of Freehand.

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Solutions

Adding a note for the users to sign in with a relevant username (mobile number) if their wallet credit on DigiPay app is different from the amount shown in the marketplace's checkout

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Installment plans were added to the checkout of the marketplace. 

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In the credit card application process, we simply changed the order. Instead of filling in credentials, and then checking for credit, we enabled a credit score check with individuals' national ID. Only if they were credible, they could continue the journey.

Unfortunately, Adding an option to directly go from DigiPay to DigiKala wasn't feasible back then due to technical limits. Today the option is available from the bottom app bar as "Stores"

Sharing insights with other teams

We shared the insights of the process with designers in other teams in a Town Hall meeting. There was a parallel project of rebranding and redesigning the home page of DigiPay's mobile app. The research insights were used to support them in defining the next steps, which resulted in over 15% engagement for the app.

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The outcome

  • The weekly retention rate was increased by 30%.

  • The CSAT in the checkout experience using digital wallet and installment plans was increased by 20%

The outcomes of this project supported the company's growth objective to increase DigiPay's mobile app's user base by 1,000,000.

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