Billing & Payments Optimisation

My Role: Discovery > Information Architecture > UX/UI Design > Validation

In its previous state, British Gas saw around 75% of its online account holders pay their bills by direct debit. Despite this, the business was lacking an understanding of payment types from a customer perspective. I was tasked with providing insight into this as well as optimising the current ‘Payment Scheme” landscape.

Goal

Simplify and optimise the experience for users who are looking to pay their bills online – allowing them to self-serve and thus, provide call reduction for the business.

Approach:

• Understand the landscape of payment types and the expectation/perceptions of users
• Align the overall experiences to these expectations where possible.
• Simplify and optimise necessary components of the payments section of the British Gas website.

Discovery

My process began with a wide scope of Initial conversations to understand the current landscape that existed within the business. From these conversations I was able to elicit areas which I was keen to understand from a users perspective.

User Interviews

Following on, I carried out interviews to gain insight on these areas – covering the entire ‘payment scheme’ lifecycle, from signing up to British Gas through to managing payments etc.

This yielded a great understanding of a customer mindset from which we were able to expose some key insights:

Understanding the current landscape

With a solid understanding of our users needs and goals with regards to payments, I now started an in-depth analysis of the existing experience for customers. A key aim here was to measure any correlation between the insights gained from the interviews and the intricacies of the product itself. Initially, I began with a usability testing session aiming to draw out issues in the current journeys carried out by customers. In tandem with this, I dived into the various product analytics to find quantitative evidence around particular ‘problem-points’ for users.

Experience Mapping

To summarise a large portion of the research carried out – I mapped out the experience of the payment scheme lifecycle from a customer perspective. This acted as a centre point for a number of discussions and ensured the product team remained customer-centric in its efforts. This would ultimately lead to the breaking down of the payment scheme problem into two separate parts.

Initial Design Ideas

In the spirit of divergent thinking, I gathered a number of key project stakeholders for a design workshop. Along with sharing the discovery work that had been covered, we worked on a Crazy-8’s workshop, allowing stakeholders to sketch out some potential design solutions-some of which would influence the final designs.

Usability Testing + Story Mapping

The initial designs were subjected to 2 further rounds of usability testing and iteratively improved accordingly. Upon completing the design work, I sat with the team and carried out a story mapping exercise to identify what our MVP would consist of. This is currently in the build process….