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Created a brand new feature in 2 weeks
Make it easy for landlords to pay their vendors and for vendors to collect these payments using the Azibo platform.
The biggest hurdle we had to face was to create a design that was simple enough for user to understand the difference between sending money to another account, merchant, and vendor.
We realized that vendors do not want to create a new Azibo account for payment collection. So, we made a guest checkout process. The vendor would receive a invitation from the landlord, enter a verification code, and then collect their payment.
Based on the interviews, I created personas for both the landlord and vendor.
Initially, the problem of a payment system started out as a very broad idea. It included rent payment and displaying transaction details.
In order to narrow down the scope, we looked at the most immediate user need - the ability to send one-time invoices to pay their vendors and other such contractors. We identified this through multiple interviews with existing customers.
Where will it live?
These are a few concepts that were made about the location of this feature.
Landlord sends payment
During user interviews, landlords had said that they want to know what the vendor invite looks like before using this feature and want the process to be more seamless the more times it is used.
What I made: Landlord can enter all information required in the format of the invite that will be sent to the vendor. For repeat vendors or purchases, the form fields can be pre-filled. Later iterations allow landlords to choose a specific bank account, assign a property, and expense a category.
Vendor receives payment
During user interviews, vendors find invoicing time consuming and do not want to create an Azibo account.
What I made: Once the vendor opens the invite and verifies with their email or number, they get pre-made invoices for all payments received. They can then redeem the money by either a check or a direct bank transfer.
Landlord’s side
The landlord can send money from their bank account screen.
Money can be sent to: an account (transfer between bank accounts), a bill (paying a company bill like PG&E), or a person (vendor).
Landlords wanted easy organization. They can assign a property and category to each transaction. This helps when they have to file taxes.
Landlords wanted to know what the vendor process is like. The success screen shows the 3 steps that the vendor will go through.
Vendor’s side
Invitation sets the exceptions for the vendor. It lists out the steps that the vendor has to do in order to be paid.
During interviews, some vendors insist on being paid via check. So we gave the vendors an option to either receive the money via direct deposit or check.
the challenge
This project was challenging since the turnover time was just 2 weeks. Due to the time constraint, we had to sacrifice on some features for the MVP version. Another sacrifice due to the time constraint was usability testing. We were able to test our prototypes on landlords but not vendors. However, we were able to talk to vendors during the discovery phase.
things i would improve on
Contact page- Allow landlords to manage their contacts and create favorite contacts
Request money- Allow both landlords and vendors to send an invoice to each other.
Improve the visuals on the success screens.
Allow edits to the transactions before they are collected.
