Role
Product Designer
Timeline
3 months
Website
Emburse is a financial tech company that focuses on expense management and spend optimization solutions.
Emburse Spend is a spend management platform that focuses on enabling finance administrators to more easily manage their company's employee driven vendor spend (i.e. software subscriptions, digital marketing, etc.) by issuing both virtual and physical card. By approving spend before it occurs through a corporate card program, Emburse Spend allows customers to gain real-time visibility and control over their teams' spend.
Project Brief & Goals
Bill Pay is a new feature that will enable customers to cover more spend, by adding bill-based spending to their corporate card programs. This allows AP clerks and finance admins to easily make payments to vendors using virtual cards.
Bill Pay helps users process payment for all bills and vendors in Spend, and better manage cash flow.
Increase Revenue
Simplifying the payment process and ensuring a hassle-free experience enables Spend to provide more value to Account Payable team.
Save time on manual processes.
Spend less time doing manual data processing and more time on other things.
Increase customer loyalty & retention
Providing a more comprehensive expense management solution strengthens customer loyalty.
$800K
Estimated revenue increase by onboarding new clients after the launch of Bill pay feature
14%
Existing customers actively started using Bill pay feature
Research 🔍
We interviewed 6 customers as part of our initial discovery research. They were selected randomly from a pool of 30+ interested participants with two primary goals:
Analyze how customers are currently paying vendor bills & problems associated with it, if any.
Determine if they would be interested in having the feature being included in Emburse Spend.
Current Process: Among these six customers, the AP process is fragmented, involving separate systems for invoice intake/review/approval (usually an ERP) and payment processing (e.g., Bill.com).
How Might We?
How might we increase customer adoption of card payments over ACH or check for bill payments?
How might we provide our customers with enhanced visibility into their cash flow?
How might we ensure a seamless experience for customers without burdening them with additional low-value SaaS products?
How might we automate and simplify the process of processing bill payments, minimizing manual efforts?
Personas
Journey Map & Brainstorming
To understand the complete flow and the users involved, I created a journey map. Later I scheduled a brainstorming call with PMs, Design Director, and other team members to discuss the flow and what we want to accomplish in Phase 1.
Customer research and brainstorming revealed a two-part invoice payment process:
Capturing/Entering an invoice and its approval path.
Deciding to pay invoices.
Emburse Spend customers already have a process outside Spend to receive and reconcile invoices, but lack an easy way to pay invoices by card. We focus on the second part of the journey, allowing customers to issue a virtual card to a vendor without the need to capture and enter invoice information.
My design process began with rough paper pen sketches and soon moved to mid-fi wireframes with an objective to test it with our customers as early as possible. Key workflows include:
Importing the bills
Paying bills
Track Payment Status
Vendor Email design
Design
Usability Testing
To efficiently evaluate the key workflow, which includes paying bills, importing bills, and assessing overall designs, we conducted usability testing with the same group of 6 customers. By engaging the same 6 customers, we were able to gather valuable feedback on the specific elements that are crucial to the usability and functionality of our product.
Task 1
Take a look at the bill pay home screen, and walk me through your first impressions. Do you see anything that needs to be improved or information that is missing?
Task 2
Users were directed to pay an invoice, and asked if there is anything missing or needs improvements.
Task 3
User were asked to Import bills - Do you have any general feedback on this flow? Is there anything that you would want to change?
Iterations
Testing the usability of my initial design results enabled me to gain a deeper understanding of users' perspectives and how to improve the design to meet their needs. I began to produce multiple different variations of wireframes. I then put the designs in front of our Internal Account payable Admins and Product manager for feedback.
Pay a bill and track it’s status
High Fidelity Mockups
Bulk Payment Workflow
Import Bills Workflow
What Customers Are Saying -
Working Well
“The interface is pretty intuitive.”
“Seems pretty intuitive. I like being able to drill down. I like the easy filter options.”
“I like the flexibility of picking and choosing what gets paid and when. Being able to schedule the payments in advance is awesome.”
“It would also be great to see a dashboard of all upcoming/scheduled payments.”
“System is fairly easy to navigate.”
Needs Improvement
“Increase clarity around when the payment will hit the Vendor’s account, how long they have to complete the payment”
“Vendor type might be nice. If cash was tight and we were trying to decide who took priority, being able to filter on the type of vendor would help (i.e. Subcontractor, Utility, Service, Government, etc.)”
“Better process for setting up and notifying vendors from Spend”
“Invoice traceability information: who was the approver, what department made the purchase, what type of spend it was. More aligned with data reflected in traditional invoice approving software.”
My Impact
Shipped full end-to-end flow within a short period, collaborating with cross-functional partners across all stages, from research, design, to execution.
Built vision, ran usability testing, and defined product framework using interactive prototypes using Figma.
Delivering the project within set timeline helped in generating more sales and therefore more revenue.
Learnings
Sharing initial ideas with cross-functional partners is easier with visuals. Low-fidelity explorations and visual references helped me better communicate with engineers, product managers, and UX researchers.
Working on high-impact project within a short time frame could be challenging. Dividing projects into multiple deliverables helped me finish within timeline.
Collaborating with multiple teams. Most of the requirements were finalized on the fly. I had to constantly coordinate between Developers and PMs for data asks and to make sure my design was feasible.