Westpac Group, Business Bank
Summary
Customer experience and UI design for a new SME business invoicing tool
My role
UX/UI design lead
Problem Statement
The Westpac Business Bank, in an effort to drive extra benefits for Business One transaction accounts, had the idea of offering free invoicing software to our business customers.
The majority of SME businesses do not use invoicing software and thus struggle to manage their outstanding incoming payments.
Project Goals
Expand our suite of business management products
Re-imagine business banking
Originate more Business One accounts
Move existing customers away from consumer accounts
Research Methods
Customer interviews
Market research analysis
Prototype testing
Customer journey
A major focus of the discovery phase of the project was to explore the desirability of the product, specifically the features that would align best with our target market. Customers were asked to rank what features they believe would be most beneficial, in comparison to their existing processes.
Core Customer Needs
The number one pain-point of the majority of respondents was getting paid on time. This has a major impact on smaller businesses, particularly regarding cashflow management.
Every business is required to spent time and effort on admin tasks, these often include manual tasks related to settlement, reporting and tax preparation.
Besides necessary business admin tasks, respondents commonly spent a large amount time manually creating invoices using a variety of static resources.
Our research identified a need for a mobile-first solution based on the demographic, business types and behaviour of our target market.
Challenges
There were a few key challenges the team discovered throughout the project, including some technical shortcomings and eligibility based on business structure. Challenges were evaluated and prioritised for either further investigation or mitigated in terms of risk and compliance.
With customers onboard themselves, it was important to allow changes to be made to the details registered with ASIC, specifically when a company (Pty Ltd) is acting as a Trustee. But - this required mitigating risk created via manually entered details being incorrect, either by mistake or involving fraud.
Customer conversations highlighted a desire for reusing previously entered information i.e. recipients, line itmes, etc. This idea proved a challenge for mobile and was heavily tested and revised before an adequate solution was deemed successful.
During customer interviews and user-testing, we discovered that many users were not overly experienced with business admin or standards, thus certain elements worked best when prompting the customer with options rather than relying on user input. An example of this selecting an appropriate due date.
Key Learnings
It became very clear that more we learned the more we didn't know about who are customer really is. While discovering the reasons behind their reluctance to engage business software we also uncovered their business management experience levels when it came to certain understandings and standards.
While it was important to make sure 'ease of creation' was maintained on mobile, it became apparent that while many would engage the platform on their phones, much of this engagement would be focussed on monitoring of incoming payments, etc. while creation of invoices would likely happen on desktop.