Simplified Bill Pay Solution (SIMBA)
The Challenge
Bill partners with many financial institutions to provide OOTB (Out Of The Box) solutions for their customer's accounts payable, accounts receivable and payment needs. While leading the UX team, we partnered with BofA and they challenged us to reimagine their existing bill pay solution into a more "Simplified Bill Pay Solution" which we coined as "SIMBA".
BofA's current bill pay solution was "CheckFree", by Fiserv, and was presenting many challenges to their SMB customer base as it was very over-featured, difficult to use and their customers simply wanted a much cleaner, simpler and faster way to pay their bills.
Fiserv's Existing CheckFree UI
What We Did
Our team's instincts lead us to the decision to immediately engage our UX team and partners in a 5 stage design sprint. We followed the format below to keep us moving and efficient in this design thinking exercise and exploration.
1. Understand: Performed Foundational Research
Our team of UX researchers, accompanied by our product managers and UX designers, began to dig in and become more proximate with many existing SMB BofA customers. In our discovery we learned of many short comings of the current bill pay platform and also received many insights on what these SMB customers were looking for in a simple bill pay solution.
In these 30+ interviews with BofA's SMB customers our research team captured a massive list of feature ideas, friction points and overall basic needs the average SMB has when paying their bills on a reoccurring schedule.
2. Diverge: Group Sketching Sessions
Our UX team guided a cross functional product team of product mangers, UX designers, content strategists and other applicable players in a high level and inclusive sketching exercise to diverge on many different ideas and ideate across the larger team. In this exercise we used the "Crazy 8" method and also engaged in using Figma's group sketch collaboration features to travel down as many potential solution paths/ideas as possible.
The team delivered their ideas in a variety of formats such as snap shots of white board drawings, sketches on paper and very low fidelity wire frames in a variety of "non-designer" tools.
3. Decide: Picked The Winner(s)
Our team then took the time to present each individual idea and discuss in detail the pros and cons of each design an how they may impact the end user.
Two winners were selected and the team pivoted direction to focus on many variants of the chosen directions and mapped out detailed storyboards of these flows.
As a way to present flexibility in the experience the team decided to travel down two paths:
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A "Ledger" style bulk pay experience similar to the existing experience but much simpler.
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A "Card" style experience which with simplified overall visual affordance and feature set.
4. Prototype: Built Interactive Flows For Concept Tests
Our team then took the time to present each individual idea and discuss in detail the pros and cons of each design an how they may impact the end user.
A couple winners were picked and the team switched direction to all focus on variants of the chosen directions and map out detailed storyboards of possible flows. Note: As a way to present flexibility in the experience the team decided to travel down two paths:
Concept A: Ledger Style
Concept B: Card Style
Concept B: "Card" Style Prototype in Figma - Make A Payment Flow
Who Did We Test?
For our concept testing we worked to recruit individuals that:
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Had and active business bank account
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Uses some form of online or mobile bill pay from their business bank account
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May not be currently active on the Bill.com platform
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0-2 employees
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Pays anywhere from 0-10 bills per month
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May use accounting software such as Quickbooks, but not Netsuite or Intacct
The Results
95% of the individuals that interacted with both concept tests chose "Concept B - Card Style". The majority of the people who chose concept B explained that they liked the ease of use when making a quick payment, the summary cards at the top of the dashboard screen and the overall simplistic design.
After receiving these strong results we polished the prototype, improved the visual branding and were ready for our final stage in our design process.
5. Validate: Presented The Final Experience
In our final stage, we tested 20 more individuals with the same qualifications as our concept testing using in person 45 minute qualitative sessions.
The team was happy to see that all tested customers expressed extreme satisfaction when navigating through the flows and we were now ready to deliver our design artifacts over to our engineering teams for build out with confidence.
The Impact
Simba was launched to a small subset of customers on May 9th, 2021 and in the the first 90 days the system successfully processed over 6,000 payments with a TPV of $6,167,177.00.
After the final roll out, BofA's new SMB Simple Bill Pay Solution has proven to be a massive benefit to all their small business customers and is now offered as a value add for all new and existing small business accounts.
