EXPERIENCE DESIGN | CASE STUDY
Empowering Merchants with Comprehensive Payment Data
This case study outlines the process of designing an analytics dashboard for merchants.
Company: Cashfree Payments
Year: 2023–24
Role: Sr. Product Designer
I led the design of the Analytics Dashboard between January to March 2024 and collaborated with product, dev team and many other internal stakeholders.
✦ All about Cashfree
Cashfree Payments enables 6,00,000+ growing businesses in India and across the globe to collect payments, make payouts, manage international payments, and more.
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Overview
In the realm of e-commerce and retail, payment data transcends mere transaction records, transforming into a cornerstone of business intelligence for merchants. This granular data empowers them to delve into customer behaviour patterns, uncover sales trends, and gain a comprehensive understanding of their financial performance. By leveraging these insights, merchants can make data-driven decisions to optimize pricing strategies, personalize marketing efforts, and ultimately propel business growth and profitability.
“Data is a tool for enhancing intuition.”
- Hilary Mason, data scientist and founder of Fast Forward Labs
Discovery & Definition
Through user interviews and surveys in 2023, we identified that most Merchants often struggle to keep track of various payment-related metrics.
Breaking Down the Problem:
Business Objective: 🤔 How might we
Boost merchant retention & reduce support inquiries?
Information Gathering & Empathising
We Interviewed 24 merchants
to deep dive further and understand Who, What, Why and How?
✦ Who are the users?
SMB owners and Finance team members
✦ What do they want to do?
Get a clear overview of payment performance and
gain deeper insights
✦ Why they want an overview and insights?
Take action based on insights which will help them grow theirbusiness
✦ How do they get the overview and insights currently?
“ I don’t know if the data processing we are doing is accurate”
“ It takes a lot of time for me to go through the data for each product”
“ It takes a lot of time also to teach new team members the process”
- we uncovered some insights
Design Sprint for Ideation
Brainstorming solutions collectively 🌩️
What should we build?
Analytics Dashboard for Payment Performance ✨
Identify characteristics & Prioritising key touchpoints
✦ Communicate info quickly
✦ Clear & efficient
✦ Represent trends & data changes over time
✦ Information hierarchy
Rapid Sketching ✏️
I presented the issues to stakeholders, leading to diverse wireframe ideas. We then consolidated and voted on the preferred ones.
Back to the desk, looking at the Competition 👀
Mapping their strength and areas of improvements
We decided to focus our attention on these 3 key areas:
✦ Evaluating the Rate of Success and Failure
✦ Simplifying Data Visualisation for enhanced comprehension
✦ Improving the Customer Conversion Rate
Iterations
Charts are an essential part of working with data, as they are a way to condense large amounts of data into an easy to understand format. Visualizations of data can bring out insights to someone looking at the data for the first time, as well as convey findings to others who won’t see the raw data.
There are countless chart types out there, each with different use cases. Often, the most difficult part of creating a data visualisation is figuring out which chart type is best for the task at hand.
Through open communication with our users, we gained a deep understanding of how they wanted to interact with their payment data. This user-centric approach allowed us to delve into the “ins and outs” of their specific needs for data comprehension.
Armed with this knowledge, we were able to strategically select the most effective chart types for each data point. This ensures the information is presented in a clear and intuitive way, cohesive the user’s ability to extract valuable insights.
Wire-framing and Quick Testing
TEST FAST, FAIL FAST, ADAPT FASTER ⚡️
Iterations
Great designs aren’t born perfect — they’re iterated on!
Found one critical insight 🔍
✦ The dashboard should be designed in 3 layers focusing on Overview, Categories and In-depth insights.
Final Design
Bringing UI consistency through Cashfree’s ever-evolving design system
✦ Analytics Highlights
Information at first glance, where merchants can effortlessly view a summary of all categories.
✦ Success Rate, Number of Transactions and Volume
Through a mix of interviews and card sorting we understood merchant’s requirement of which information to stack together for their ease.
✦ Detail View
We envisioned this experience seamlessly transitioning from a broad overview to a detailed view. To facilitate this, users can select a specific legend card to delve deeper into the details.
✦ Insight Widget
For highlighting actionable items for the users and showing them trends, users have to spend less time analysing charts.
✦ Conversion Rate and Failure Rate
The conversion rate focuses on customer insight.
Failure rate even though significant, it’s also something which is of high use only when there is an outbreak in any of the payment modes or methods.
Key Takeaway
✦ Importance of proper knowledge transfer for design hand-off
✦ Sometimes it’s good to take two steps backwards to move forward towards the right path.
Insights
This project is being built currently but we have thought about the metrics we want to look at to gain insights, which are:
- Number of repeat users
- Drop in queries raised to the support team regarding payment analytics
After we gather and understand from the learning of Release 1 of the project. I will be working on Phase 2 where we want to explore giving merchant tools to build their own custom charts and pin them.
