Creating peace of mind with flexible payments
I led design and research that introduced EarlyPay, a feature adopted by 13% of customers.
Our starting point
I joined the Payments team during my second year at Root Insurance. Our goal was to improve retention rates and our starting point was an unprioritized backlog of ideas around payment flexibility.
Forming our hypothesis
While my to-be Product partner wrapped up work on another team, I conducted desk research—digging through app store reviews, Zendesk tickets, and old project documents—to get familiar with the domain and to brainstorm where we might focus.
I presented my exploratory research to my product, design, and research teammates. We came to the same hypothesis: our customers would benefit more from flexibility in payment timing rather than in payment methods.
Validating the hypothesis
To test our hypothesis, my UX Research partner and I surveyed 400 customers about how they pay and share bills. Clara and I learned that...
- 90% of our customers pay some bills early.
- their key motivations are to avoid late fees.
- people overwhelmingly favour full payments over partial payments.
We then interviewed 6 customers, centering each discussion around a calendar activity to learn about their financial situations and how they manage their bills.
Our biggest takeaway
Financially vulnerable customers pay bills early to cope with variable income. This made it easy to deprioritize ideas about cash and bank transfer payments. What customers needed most was the ability to pay their bill as soon as they had the money to do it.
We set out to build our V1 solution with peace of mind as the core design principle. This informed decisions such as...
- letting people pay next month's bill at any time
- sending email confirmations where there were none before
- using a "new" badge to help people discover the new feature, avoiding existing UI patterns that were often associated with warnings and deadlines
Completing the handoff
I wrote design documentation to detail backend logic for engineers and to articulate design decisions for future reference.
