Overview
During my time on the billing team at Vendasta, we would get feedback from our users on the difficulty of setting up billing and knowing what's even possible with our billing system. I decided to spend a hackathon exploring ways to improve transparency and onboarding for our billing system. Although initially a hackathon project, it was broken down into small sprint stories for the dev team to work on throughout the quarter.
Approach
I started this project by mapping out our billing system's different features and linking them to the setup pages required to use them.
With these relationships visualized, my next step was to create a transparency map for every screen of our billing system and features. This mapping exercise aimed to evaluate if screens in our billing system informed the user of the required setup flows to utilize each feature.
Nearly every screen lacked the transparency of any required setup. One of the worst examples was invoices. Users first need to set up Vendasta Payments to collect payments directly from an invoice. However, instead of informing the user of this, the options to collect payment would disappear entirely if Vendasta Payments hadn't been set previously.
Luckily, it's easy to start small; we can add contextual alerts throughout the workflows to inform users of any required setup.
Empty state pages
I also took the opportunity to ideate our empty state pages on our platform. With the amount our empty pages have, we can surface more valuable information to new users and give them more context on features they're not yet using.
When our growth team caught wind of this project, they requested to work with me on updating these pages to this design and now the new standard across the platform.
