One challenge that a previous employer faced was duplicating design and development efforts across multiple products. They'd have multiple teams developing the same features, all trying to solve the same problems at the same time without communicating with each other. Obviously this leads to a lot of wasted time, energy, money, etc not to mention introduces inconsistencies between products, support... it's just a massive headache.
To help remedy this problem, I was placed in charge of a new team whose goal was to build features and tools that could be universally utilized across all products. Our first project? A secure digital wallet that would be used to collect payment information any time someone was trying to check out.
On the surface you'd think that creating a digital wallet would be fairly straight forward, but we quickly realized that there is a lot to consider:
We'd need to make sure that the information collected meets the highest PCI standards for security.
We'd need to allow users to pay with every kind of preferable payment method, including: Credit/Debit Cards, E-checks, PayPal, ApplePay, and GooglePay while figure out the partnership details in order to ensure they all work as expected.
We'd want to allow users to save payment methods for future use for things like recurring payments or future-dated-payments, and present those saved payment methods to them as an option the next time they check out.
We'd need to make it customizable so that product teams could easily choose which features they wanted to include and stylize the wallet without impacting the UX in a negative way.
We'd need to make it expandable so that we can add more payment methods or features in the future without requiring a complete redesign.
We'd need to give users a way to manage their saved payment methods, including automatically updating card information when it became available from card providers.
On top of all of that, the developers on the team wanted to experiment with using a few new development platforms to expand our library of options, so we needed to factor that into the project as well.
When the UX is TOO good...
After distilling all of the requirements, completing multiple rounds of design and testing to ensure we had the most usable product, we went live with our digital wallet with a single client so that we could monitor how users were interacting with it before a much larger rollout.
Early feedback was glowing! Users were sailing through their checkout faster than they ever had before and were commenting on how much they loved the new streamlined process. Clients and managers considered it a massive victory, and praised the team for their efforts. That is until....
... we realized that the digital wallet was losing the company money. How could this be? More people were checking out, more quickly, and loving the process... so what's the problem?
In our efforts to make the user experience the best it possibly could be, we included a feature which made it clear to users how much they'd be paying in fees for each of the available payment methods. Credit/Debit cards typically have a fee associated with them while e-checks were often free. One thing that we had overlooked in our effort to create the best experience for the users is that doing so would result in more users choosing the free payment method, thus reducing the expected revenue for the company. Doing what was the absolute best for the users was coming at the expense of profits.
How do you resolve an issue like this?
We had a lot of conversations about how best to address this. Our team felt that the best UX is the best UX regardless of cost to the company, but obviously there was push back from above.
Ultimately we had to press forward with a "good enough" UX, whereby the usability was top notch but we didn't make it so obvious that one of the payment options was free while others required a fee.
Overall the project was and continues to be a massive success. Users got a secure, modern digital wallet to use during the checkout process, and the company got a flexible feature that could be utilize across all products to save money and resources.