My Role
End-to-End Experience Owner
Team
1 PM, 5 Engg.,1 Comm. Designer
Time Period
Aug 2021 - Sep 2021
Background and Overview:
So you may have read about the Vendor Payments app here, and how we came about building it. By August 2021, we had found somewhat of a market fit with Owner-led startups and D2C brands for Vendor Payments, but in order to get more growth, we were looking to expand into the Mid-market where the volume of invoices dealt by the merchant is quite high.
When the volume of invoices exchanged is high sourcing and reconciliation become difficult. In addition, post-payment communication is a pain. If a trusted vendor could add their invoices and have visibility of their payment status, the merchants’ workload is reduced as they just have to review and approve/ reject the invoice.
With Vendor Portal, RazorpayX Vendor Payments is trying to tap the mid-market segment, where this requirement is commonly seen across finance tools.
🧖🏻 User Personas
Design Process
👁 Vision: How can we make Vendor Portal a 10x Differentiator?
Our strategy for RazorpayX was to make all our product core flows a 10x experience. How do we do that? Make Vendor Portal ubiquitous — the one stop for Vendors to receive their payments. For we found the following areas to work on
1. Multiple touch-points to get back → Make it frictionless. 2. Ease of invoice sourcing → Think of bringing sourcing to emails and WhatsApp 3. Multiple vendors on a single dashboard; integrates with their existing accounting tools → Let Vendors advocate the product to other merchants 4. Easy to switch to RazorpayX → Let these vendors be the next crop of RazorpayX users.
To achieve this we took the following approach:
🧭 Aligning our team: We did a collaborative workshop to set the ideal vision for Vendor Portal. With all the information, we could come up with the desired User Flows. The example of the User Flow below depicts how we could go WIDE and identify the various touch points for this feature.
📝 Defining scope With this broad vision, we expanded our MVP to become a Minimal Lovable Product. The rest of the features/ ideas were set down on the roadmap once the idea of a Vendor Portal is validated.
💡 Pre-mortem Exercise + Delighters:
We conducted a pre-mortem exercise with all the stakeholders to identify any risks or edge cases across Product, Design, User Flows and Tech. Some points came out as pressing concerns which we wanted to look into immediately, others could wait till further validation. We extended a few minutes to also identify areas where we could find an opportunity to add Delight 🪄
FYI: See twitter thread on importance of collaborative exercises here.
🧪 Practicing high risk experiments with early access releases In order to validate design faster, we wanted to get the user involved earlier. We did this in multiple ways. We shared a walkthrough of the product with our Makers Club to get a heads-up on the design. We did prototype testing as well as scheduled calls with our users in Early Access to make sure we are building the right product.
Design Solution: Early Access Release
🔬 For early access we decided on the following scope:
Design Goals for Vendor Portal :
Friction-less:
Reduce all points of friction, including any login friction as well as creation of payments.
Coherent with the Platform:
We decided to follow existing patterns so as to reduce build time and go-to-market faster
Final Solution (Prototypes):
Setup Vendor Portal
Merchant sees the announcement or goes to the settings and enables the Vendor Portal.
Vendor Receives the Invite (over Email) and decides to Sign-Up, gets onboarded:
Vendor creates a payment request:
Accepting/ Rejecting Invoices from the Vendor Portal:
Other TouchPoints:
Multiple touch points to bring vendors back to the portal and reduce friction: 1. Acknowledgement Emails 2. Summary Emails 3. Future: Whatsapp
We’re currently testing easing invoice sourcing with email integration.
Make sure the URL is easy to recall as well as the vendor can stay logged in for a longer time to reduce the friction of adding the password.
The vendor can access all merchants from the same dashboard by switching merchants.
