UX case study - Usability testing a Japanese payment app - Our Stories

The objective of this project is to conduct a user experience case study on Aftee. Aftee is a payment App owned by Net Protections, a leading FinTech company in Japan. The company expended its market from Japan to Taiwan last year.

The personal goal for this project is to:

Learn and practice how to conduct usability testing, learn from users’ insights, identify pain points through user journal map, and design wireframes.
Complete my first user experience case study from designing interview questions, conducting user interviews to offer some improvement opportunities.

About Aftee

Aftee gives online and offline shopper a new shopping experience as it allows users to enjoy the products without paying immediately. Besides, users are able to keep their personal information secret. During a transaction, the user just needs to enter authentication codes through cell phone and he/she is free to go.

Some online stores will record customer’s credit card number and I have detected some unauthorized credit card charges. As a result, I refrain from checking out via credit cards. After conducting several user experience tests last week, I discovered that there are few opportunities for improvement.

The Design Process

Human Centered Design process

Inspiration

User research

Ideation

Persona
User Journey Map
Design Opportunities
Key Issues & Recommended Solutions

Implementation

Medium blog post

User research

As a group, our team started out by conducting user interviews with 20 potential users to find out their pain points and what they think of the current app. The interview questions were focus on the in-app registering and payment process. I also asked users to complete a few tasks to find out the reason why they use the product, what do they use it for, and what their pain points are.

When conducting usability test, I hide my personal perspectives. Users are asked to verbalize their thoughts. Some follow-up questions such as “why” , “how do you think of this function” , “tell me more about that”, and if-then statements were asked to get users to elaborate on their true feelings.

Key Findings

Users are required to set an 8-digits code in the process of creating a new account. The system accepts code that contains both numbers and alphabet. However, users are not well informed about the rule, and only after several failures, they could figure it out.
40% of the interviewed users would like to set up Touch ID to speed up the log-in process.
75% of the interviewed users decide not to link Aftee account to their Facebook account because of trust issues.
Most users find the information displayed in “order details” unclear as the terms are confusing. For example, if they want to sort the bills by payment due date, they cannot find the exact term to filter.
Nearly all interviewed users would spend more when they were told that they still have $1,000 to use than that they have spent $1,000.

Persona

User Journey Map

Design Opportunities

ased on the user journey map and key findings above, I identified some design opportunities. I then used a 2×2 prioritization matrix to prioritize these opportunities based on their importance to users as well as to Aftee.

In the end, I picked the top 3 issues that matter the most to both parties. That is, to enhance app features, browsing experience and in-app experience.

Key Issues & Recommended Solutions

In this section, I provided one solution for each of the issues above.

Issue 1: User is used to paying the bill after checking the order details, but he is not allowed to do it in the same page.

It is inconvenient for me to constantly switch pages just to pay my bills. — User 1

This is the top pain point among all the users I tested with. When users browse “order details” page and select the “order receipt”, they are able to check the details, such as item name and quantity. However, there is no such a “conduct payment” button in the same page for users to make payment.

Enhance app features: add one extra “pay here” button at the end of “order receipt” page.

Issue 2: User expects to know the spending power to use, but accidentally gets the wrong result.

I thought the in-app credit left is not enough for me to buy this item but actually I can afford it. — User 2

It is common to use a pie chart to visualize the budget and spending; however, users tested are concerned with the “spending power to use” rather than “actual spending”. After analyzing, I summarized the problems displayed in current UI as below:

As the diagram is colored in red, it wrongly emphasizes on “actual spending”.
Users accidentally take the section colored in blue as total spending power, while it actually means spending power left.

Better browsing experience: show spending power to use in percentage and change its color into green.

Issue 3: User expects to select payment method instantly, while accidentally picking the non-desired method.

I would like to make payments through FamilyMart, a convenience store, but I don’t know which category I should pick to get there. — User 3

In Taiwan, online shoppers usually have three options to make payments. There are “pay via credit card”, “pay via money transfer”, or “pay via convenience store”. The app includes last two of them; however, it didn’t sort these payments into understandable categories. I briefly analyzed as below:

The name of each category should be mutually exclusive rather than compatible. While in this example, the term “convenience store” and “FamilyMart” are not mutually exclusive as FamilyMart is one type of convenience stores. As a result, when users enter this page, he has to try both categories to find the ideal payment method.

FamilyMart appears in two different categories.

Better in-app experience: FamilyMart bar code is grouped into “convenience store” category.

Reflection

From this case study, I’ve learned not to let presumptions affect interviews and product designs. In observing each user’s action, I reacted correspondingly to guide users and ask the right questions. I also find user journey map and tasks-to-be-done useful in identifying pain points.

Besides, even though you interviewed a group of users with same gender, demography, and interest, you’ll still get different insights from each user. It is this unexpected surprise that makes the whole study fun and meaningful.

This article is written by YiYing Lee on UX Design here.