Product Strategy and design for an automatic payments system

AEP is a leading electricity provider in the midwest area. AEP wanted to move away from a third party vendor and build their own software for automatic bill payments. As the lead designer on the project, I worked with the PO, team and several other internal stakeholders to define the UX strategy for the product and also designed the product.

Getting Started - Understanding the tech

As with many traditional companies, AEP’s infrastructure was built over several years. This meant there was a lot of technical limitations about what could be implemented or changed.

I started off with getting to know the team and learning about the overarching IT infrastructure from them. Over a few meetings with the product owner and rest of the dev team, I started gaining a good understand of what can, and can NOT be done with auto-pay.

Understanding the users

Given the limited budget allocated for the project, a detailed user research was out of question, but there were many pressing questions around automatic payments and that of AEP’s in particular, which I felt needed to be answered.

As an alternative, I proposed a gorilla-style research study so that we could identify at least the most pressing issues AEP customers face around automatic payments. And lo and behold, the cafeteria space gave me access to hundreds of AEP employees who also were AEP’s loyal customers! After talking to a decent number of people, we discovered some interesting problems users face:

• Some users did not know AEP was offering auto-pay free of cost.

• The existing auto-pay took much longer than user’s expectation to get activated. Many avoided auto-pays because of that.

• Users were not sure about situations where there’s not enough funds in the account or if a payment went through. They felt that it is much difficult to manage auto-pay than it is to simply make monthly payments without fail

These findings helped us improve the design for auto-pay even further, as I was iterating on it with feedback from product owners and further gorilla-type usability testing. In the meanwhile, I started learning about where does the auto-pay fit into the entire AEP eco-system, especially that of the bill payment experience.

Understanding business needs

AEP offered several bill payment options other than automatic payments. After studying all of them, I learned that they all come with varying level of cost and convenience to the user.

Each product offering in AEP is owned by a separate team, this meant that the teams often were competing for web presence and resources. I proposed a stakeholder alignment workshop, making a case that there was need for all the teams owning different payment options to align to a common vision such that the new auto-pay feature serves in everyone’s best interest.

Stakeholder alignment workshop

We brought in product owners and directors across the board under the same room to talk about a few things related to bill payments, including auto-pay:

• How much do we promote auto-pay over other options?

• Assessment of revenue vs customer experience across all payment options

• Envisioning the ideal payments options page and bill payment experience.

• Feedback on auto-pay concepts designed thus far

Impact of the workshop

• The biggest win for our team was that all the stakeholders unanimously decided that auto-pay should be promoted over other options.

• Teams for the first time co-designed a unified payments experience AEP customers could have.

• And ultimately, we left the workshop much more informed about the feasibility of the design for auto-pay we had thus far

Final Design

After several iterations based on informed research findings from user, business, and tech end, we came up with a simple workflow for new customers to setup automatic payments. It accommodated several edge cases including late payments, when a recently made payment has not come through yet, user has pending payments or bounced checks, etc. And also designed necessary features like stopping or pausing autopay, receiving notifications, paying in advance, etc.