The project aims to integrate expense management capabilities into the B2B Payment Platform for enhanced financial management. This two-month UX case study aims to enhance the platform by incorporating a sophisticated expense management feature, enabling businesses to create, manage, and track expenses and payments within a unified system. Merging these disconnected workflows into one platform will improve financial controls, reduce errors, increase operational efficiencies, and provide users with a comprehensive view of their finances.
Problem
The B2B Payment Platform lacks an integrated expense management system, causing significant challenges for users. This disjointed process leads to inefficiencies, reconciliation errors, lost expenses, and delays in payment processing. A unified, streamlined solution is needed to address these gaps and provide the automation, synchronization, and financial controls that users require.
Task
My responsibilities include researching user needs, mapping detailed requirements, designing user experience, identifying invoicing pain points, mapping functional requirements, creating user flows, designing wireframes, mockups, and prototypes, receiving user feedback, and working with the engineering team to ensure seamless integration. Our focus is to remove invoicing friction and provide seamless financial management capabilities.
The B2B Payment Platform lacks an integrated expense management system, causing significant challenges for users. This disjointed process leads to inefficiencies, reconciliation errors, lost expenses, and delays in payment processing. A unified, streamlined solution is needed to address these gaps and provide the automation, synchronization, and financial controls that users require.
The project aims to integrate expense management capabilities into the B2B Payment Platform for enhanced financial management. The current disjointed workflows between external invoicing systems and the payment platform result in inefficiencies, errors, and lack of financial visibility. The planned integration will automate invoice generation, sync invoice status to payments, enable recurring invoicing, track accounts receivable/payable, and generate invoice reports. This will streamline operations, improve cash flow, reduce overhead, and strengthen financial controls for businesses.
My responsibilities include researching user needs, mapping detailed requirements, designing user experience, identifying invoicing pain points, mapping functional requirements, creating user flows, designing wireframes, mockups, and prototypes, receiving user feedback, and working with the engineering team to ensure seamless integration. Our focus is to remove invoicing friction and provide seamless financial management capabilities.
The product:
Duplo is a financial technology company that provides digital tools to streamline financial operations for businesses, particularly in Africa. It automates processes like invoicing, bill approval, fund collection, and expense management. Duplo offers efficient, cost-effective, and transparent payment solutions, enabling businesses to manage their finances more effectively and improve cash flow.
Understanding the user
Painpoint
Lack of integrated invoice management forces inefficient workarounds like manual entry across disconnected systems, causing major productivity challenges
The fragmented workflows between separate payment and invoice systems leads to frequent errors like mismatched payments and invoices, resulting in reconciliation issues
No linkage between payments and invoices makes it complex for users to get an accurate overall view of their financial position across payables and receivables
Missing invoices due to the lack of synchronization and tracking across systems hampers financial controls and cash flow management
No automated recurring invoice capabilities within the payment platform increases administrative workload for routine billing
The inability to quickly generate customized invoices tailored to unique payment terms for different clients is a major limitation
In summary, the absence of integrated invoicing creates significant inefficiencies, challenges in maintaining accurate financial records, and unnecessary manual workarounds ultimately leading to a frustrating user experience.
Personas
User Summary: Diverse professionals like finance managers, accountants, and business administrators who play key roles in B2B financial transactions, invoices, and record-keeping.
Compliance flow
Users of the B2B Payment Platform currently face considerable challenges and inefficiencies in critical workflows due to the platform's complex interface and lack of intuitive features.
Initiating even simple one-off payments requires navigating through convoluted screens and forms that make it difficult to quickly complete transactions. The process of tracking the status of payments after they are submitted is cumbersome, as transaction histories lack clarity. There are no simple dashboards that provide at-a-glance views into money coming in and out.
UX Solution Overview:
To address the key user challenges, the UX redesign of the B2B Payment Platform will center around:
Implementing an intuitive invoicing interface that allows seamless generation of customizable invoices directly tied to payments. Features will include quick creation of recurring invoices, configurable billing terms per client, and one-click generation from payment screen.
Enabling automated syncing between payment and invoice status in real time to support reconciliation and cash flow tracking. Users will be able to clearly view whether invoices are paid, pending, or past due.
Providing overview dashboards that give at-a-glance visibility into accounts receivable/payable to simplify tracking.
Building streamlined workflows between payments and invoices supported by sitemaps, intuitive navigation, progress trackers.
Allowing easy creation of invoice reports tailored to user needs for financial record management.
Offering robust search/filters to instantly locate transactions and corresponding invoices.
The focus will be on leveraging UX principles to simplify and connect the workflows for payments and invoicing into one unified and user-centric platform.
Key Results:
34% increase in operational efficiency based on time spent on invoicing-related tasks after integrating workflows
41% reduction in invoice errors/exceptions after implementing automated syncing between payments and invoices
76% user satisfaction rating on ease of creating, managing, and reconciling invoices within the platform
28% higher response rate to overdue invoices by enabling highly visible invoice status tracking
55% of users opted into recurring invoices for simplified billing, reducing overhead
Accounting close process accelerated by 3 days due to streamlined financial reporting
In summary, key metrics clearly demonstrated the solution delivered substantial improvements in efficiency, accuracy, and user satisfaction. Unifying payments and invoicing in one platform dramatically simplified workflows, reduced manual tasks, and strengthened financial management across the board. The UX-focused redesign delivered immense value.
Business settings page
Key Learnings:
The criticality of early stage alignment with stakeholders on goals and success metrics to ensure shared vision. Frequent collaboration is crucial.
Depth of user insights obtained in discovery phase directly correlated to solution effectiveness. Comprehensive understanding of needs is key.
Significant value derived from incremental design iterations versus monolithic launches. Continued evolution based on user feedback optimizes product.
Usability testing was pivotal in uncovering navigation and workflow flaws early when easy to correct. Testing throughout is essential.
While rigorous upfront design is crucial, long-term user-centeredness requires persistence. User experience must remain top priority post-launch.
Strong cross-functional team collaboration was integral to preserving design integrity through complex build phase.
In summary, continuously focusing on stakeholder goals, user needs, iterative refinement, testing, collaboration, and commitment to UX excellence even post-launch are essential to crafting engaging and effective solutions.
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