Enabling Merchant Onboarding | 2017
Mastercard's merchant onboarding process was built around an inefficient and manual method of data capture and underwriting. The turnaround time was typically six weeks to several months, creating significant obstacles for Mastercard's sales team whose goal was to quickly onboard new merchants.
Mastercard challenged us to design an application to solve many of these problems in 10 weeks — allowing them to conduct user testing with their customers and internal stakeholders to gain buy-in, gather feedback and obtain funding before building the end-to-end solution.
Our end deliverables in this condensed timeframe were:
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A fully functional iOS tablet app
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Clickable prototype containing key user flows for internal presentations
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Marketing video to sell the product idea internally
Creating the Product Strategy
We held a workshop with the Product Owner, Business Stakeholders, SMEs and our internal team to define and prioritize features that became our product backlog.
We then fleshed-out and illustrated the key user flows to ensure alignment across the team and technical feasibility.
Working in Design Sprints
We worked in parallel with development over the course of five, two-week sprints. Together, we whiteboarded the UI and went right into visual design with development coding the features while we designed and adding our front-end interfaces when complete. This was not an ideal way to work, but close collaboration and proximity smoothed over many challenges we faced.
As we were designing the app UI, we created detailed storyboards for our clickable prototype that guided users through specific tasks to verify the flow, screens and features.
Once the features were designed and agreed to, we developed a product marketing video that was used to socialize and sell the new product internally.
Internal Product Marketing Video
Outcomes & Learnings
Outcomes
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The prototype was delivered on-time, enabling our client to demo the end-to-end functionality to his senior leadership team
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Unfortunately, our client was unable to obtain further funding to keep our agency on the project and built the final product with his in-house team
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Learnings
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Having a dedicated, cross-functional scrum team allowed us to move quickly. However, our engineers had to rework many UI components they developed once we handed off final design, and we were forced to plan a sprint just for clean-up to care for all the inconsistencies